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I stumbled upon ur channel while searching for a walkthrough for the game "dishonored 2" . For some reason the game is still on pause, and here I am discovering ur beautiful videos. Beautiful content and so you are. Much love from morocco 🇲🇦

Would people with aphantasia be unable to describe a criminal to a sketch-up artist?

Hi. My mind is blown and I have questions: Do you daydream? For example if you are in love and you daydream about it, is it more like a radio play in your head? Can you solve practical problems by thinking about them? Or do you have to look at them at the same time? Do you dream at night? Can you describe the look of a loved one? When this person isn't around, what do you remember about him or her? When you remember him or her saying something, do you just hear it in your mind? Can you draw things you can’t look at? And if you can, how do you know where and how to start? Is your hand just drawing it? Sorry for my curiosity, but this is fascinating. 🙃

What if I can imagine an apple and it's background, and also can feel my fingers touching it, although I'm not touching anything

all i see is black

I'm a few years late stumbling into your video. I found it very interesting. Thank you! My personal experience is that I have a very visual memory. When I read books they are like movies in my head. When I'm solving problems for work, the code is typing out as I think about it. I find 2 things fascinating. 1. If i try to "zoom" in on any of these brilliant and detailed images or movies they lose details. 2. I have 3 kids and they all think I'm crazy bc they don't have the same experience. Just thought I'd share my experience. I hope you are doing well and enjoying much success.

I have hyperphantasia. As a child I would have a mental image associated with peoples names. Example: when someone would say my uncles name "Davy" I would visually see a gravy boat. Often the image rhymed to the name. This name imagery no longer occurs, but I still have hyperphantasia. I am an artist.

I have a very weak visual imagination. I think it’s better to say I work off feelings. Not emotional feelings exactly, but physical. If someone were to say “imagine a beam of light” I would think of sunlight coming through the window. It would be a very quick blip; probably of a memory or something similar. If you asked me to visually describe the scene, I’d have to reimagine it like an old projector movie that flickers a bit between frames. Now, if you were to ask me to feel the warmth of the sunbeam or describe the textures of the objects in the scene with the sunbeam, that I could do in pretty vivid detail. Possibly even get the interviewer to feel the texture as well. When I’d lose water bottles at work, I’d have to put out ‘feelers’ for lack of a better term. Especially if I wasn’t paying close attention when I set the bottle down, I can’t just look back in my memory to ‘see’ where I set it. I have to feel out where I remember physically having it last. Fun times. Also, holding on the to same image or expanding the image is exhausting and hurts my brain to do it for too long. I’ve given myself headaches before trying to keep an imagine in my mind and trying to make it detailed. So much easier to just use physical memory/imagery. Ex: textures, muscle memory etc.

Every person I've heard saying they have or don't have Aphantasia uses the words "visualize" and "see" without explaining what they mean by that. No one is born literate. If people weren't forced to learn to read, some people would learn and some wouldn't. That doesn't mean some people are "able to" read. It means some people developed the skill of reading. If you can draw, you can visualize. If you can describe something, you can visualize. If you can recognize letters, you can visualize, by what I think of as visualizing. I don't see through my eyes, when visualizing. Sonar is a way of "visualizing" that doesn't use light and eyeballs.

Its black. Always black. I have never been able to picture something. But i just assumed that was how everyone was. My wife an interior decorator says i want this pillow and this colour and this and that what do you think? I dont know i cant picture it. Ive said this to her for 20+ years and now i can tell her its not me just not wanting to answer but i actually cant see it in my mind. I. A veteran with PTSD and i have night terrors and the fact that i can see them makes it more real to me becaue i dont picture things when concious but dont remember dreams just know cause my wife and kids tell me i move and talk like a dog having a dream

How about stages of life correlated to ability?

Aphantasia test: Picture 3 balls. Were they beside each other left to right, on top of each other or inside like russian dolls? If you know the the orientation you do not have aphantasia

i might have hyperphantasia. when i imagine an apple i get the apple, but its in a well lit room with large windows, probably around 4 or 5 pm judging by the soft glow of the sun. its a decorated room, has a small kitchen nook with utensils etc, a stuffed but organised bookshelf. i can put myself in the room and eat the apple, i can feel it in my mouth and taste it, i can touch the walls and feel the texture on my fingers. i can even imagine the feelings of new limbs like wings or a tail, how it feels to move them, and it genuinely feels like im moving a "phantom limb" even though i have no precedent as to what that might feel like. ever since i was a kid ive used my imagination to tell myself stories to alleviate boredom, especially to help myself fall asleep. its a double edged sword though when it comes to mental health, because suddenly those bad ideas feel a lot more real and possible.

This is fascinating! I can definitely "see" images in my head, but I may be somewhere around the upper range of the average, because although my images are quite clear, colorful and bright, I cannot see them as if they were in front of me, bu rather in my brain.

when I was a child I remember having a really clear minds eye... but at some stage in either teenage or my 20's it went. I didn't know there was a name to not having one. its actually really reassuring to know I'm not alone. but I do wonder why it went.. it was so clear as a child.. now if there's anything its like its behind a smoke screen.. so strange

Sometimes I see things very vividly, sometimes with a kind of lower resolution. It's not blurry then, just not as detailed. And I usually do that unwittingly. For one that means it's sometimes hard to control what I actually see, and it's usually like an imaginary movie I see while I read, hear, say, think something. It's just playing out. To the point that I have been told about situations that would have been inappropriate to observe, but I saw them accidentally! The memory alone makes me blush again... 😳 Sometimes funny, though. Friend of mine told such a story, I blushed (as usual) and asked "Did I ever tell you about my imagination?" - "That you see everything you hear? I know." - <heart attack> Like when you accidentally walk into someone being in the bath room. "Oh, I'm so sorry! Seems you forgot to lock the door!" - "I didn't ... forget. 😉" - argh!

It seems like the validity of the responses in the general query or test for Aphantasia (e.g. Imagine X, now, what color was X?) is unprovable based on how it's presented from what I have seen. And, it seems like it is susceptible to things like social desirability response bias. I can't "project" with my eyes either on the darkness of my closed eyelids nor on a wall, or blank paper. However, I can draw in great detail, for instance, my breakfast table, that table, what was on it, it's color, the surrounding area and from any point, seated, above it, from the perspective of a miniature self on the table, etc. As I had progressed into a progressive neurological condition I have increased hallucinations both visual, auditory, and some tactile. And in a few instances I have hallucinated an idea that seemed as an actual real world image of an object. (I was contemplating a kitchen remodel late one night and "projected" a realistic image of a stainless steel vent hood on the wall above the cooktop.) I'm basically just confused on what I am experiencing (not the hallucinations) and whether or not it is categorized as Aphantasia. Any thoughts?

I'm a career musician and have an MA in Cognitive Science. Thank you for this video. Next week I'm giving a talk at a community centre about navigating the creative life as an aphantasic. Please reach out if I can help you in any way.

see, I know aphantasia is more common than we think, because every time I see a video about it, I see dozens of people in the comments being like "ohhhh that explains my entire life"

I have visual snow syndrome and hyperphantasia. So it’s definitely a spectrum , I enjoyed learning more about the way I see. Thank you for this

This is cool

Is it normal to be able to imagine a situation and make it more carton or drawn or schetced

i have hyperphantasia but its weird, i see everything so vividly in my head but as i try getting clearer and sharper the shapes try to dismantle but still keep that overly vivid form

This is really helpful

What are you if you can draw places you've never been before without referencing them?

I think I have hyperphantasia and synesthesia, I say think because it's so difficult to know if we're all describing the same things I guess. Like, how do I know if what someone else calls vivid is what I call vivid? But I'm like 95% sure. It's been both beautiful and horrible tbh. It's a beautiful thing that I can see my loved ones' faces so clearly even after they're gone from this world, but it's horrible when the intrusive thoughts come (I mean actual intrusive thoughts, hate that I even have to specify with how much the term has lost its meaning, I'm diagnosed with OCD), or when bad memories come to my mind cause it's just like being there again. I also do tend to daydream a lot, but hey I don't have a TV at home and can still watch my own stories as if it were an actual movie. Something I've noticed too is that for some reason I can visualize things more vividly if I have my eyes open rather than closed, or well, I guess I have more control? If my eyes are closed I see things but usually it's my mind taking me on the journey, but if they're open I can see what I consciously decide I want to see, does that make sense? 😅 And with synesthesia it's so difficult to explain how it feels... But things like music that I can see as lines that make flowy or rigid movements and have a specific color and thickness(?), or words that just have a color when I hear them, numbers that have a textures... That's the closest I can get to putting it into words but it feels like incomplete descriptions tbh and also English isn't my first language so I'm struggling lmao

Thank you for sharing your work and condition. just aharing: When my daughter was in grade school studying biology and asked me to help her 'make' a strand of DNA and label the parts. I had a hard time convincing her the 3-D representation I made was anywhere near correct, and the argumentswere huge😢. I saw her difficulty in putting a 3-D object in her mind when the biology book representation was 2-D. I did not have a name for this until I came across this ondition. She is a very smart young lady with a big job in the insurance industry today. She also does not remember much from her childhood 😮. I am a 2D artist and sculptor and am able to draw, paint or construct just about anything. Both children are very (too?) smart and ridgid in their interpersonal skills.

I have aphantasia - I do not see anything in my "minds eye". When I read (and I read a lot) I do not see, feel or smell anything, though when something resonates well, it can generate emotion in me. The only thing I will "hear" is sometimes when I read, I actually read each word individually, almost as if I can hear them. This is very annoying because it slows down the reading speed. I cannot pinpoint to what causes that to happen - perhaps it is when I am concentrating deeply or am tired. Usually, words flow into sentences in my mind. And I generally skip over long descriptions because they only bore me. I am a published novel writer (not very successful!) with five novels and four genealogical books to my credit. When I write fiction, I "act out" dialog aloud to help create it. To describe anything, I will find a picture to describe - examples would be a particular style of chair, or a house. I almost never make up in my mind an important element for any scene. I will even find a picture of a tree to use to describe sitting under a tree. My settings and characters are rather generically described - the tall handsome dark haired man, for example. Once in a while I would use a particular person as basis for a character, their mannerisms as well as their looks, but when I "imagine" them in my mind, it is with words, not pictures.

I came across this video years after you posted, but feel compelled to share about my experiences with reading! I'm on the autism spectrum and think I have hyperphantasia and synesthesia. I started reading early, so the differences in how I process language weren't identified until I was much older. I have some level of dyslexia - individual letters and numbers get jumbled for me a lot and my spelling is atrocious. But I also made a focused effort in childhood to memorize the dictionary so I could learn all of the words, and I took pictures of the words in my brain. Rather than reading letters, I read whole words like pictures. If I encounter words that I don't know, I struggle a lot to figure out what I'm reading. It also makes learning new languages challenging. I'd love to read your thesis if I can find it!

is there any way for me to read your thesis? its a subject i find extremely interresting and something i might actually be interrested in pursuing myself either for the sake of creating visual art that can show people with aphantasia what its like to experience hyperphantasia and the other way around as i have a fluctuating degree of phantasia that spans all the way from one side to the other which gives me some amount of insight into both sides. and if i dont get the opportunity to study visual art then its a topic i find interresting enough that i would potentially want to study it the way you did. have you done any research into whether dopamine or serotonin regulation could play into it in any way? cause a lot of drugs that mess with dopamine and especially serotonin has in my experience had the ability to temporarily strengthen my phantasia a lot, and even "cured" a complete long lasting case of aphantasia that i gained as an adult.

i just realized i must be on the hyper or close to hyper scale. Sometimes when i close my eyes at night i see faces of people i do not know.

So I took SUIS but I couldn't find anywhere that explains the results!! how can I interpret my result? (50/60)

Dr. Oliver Sacks discussed people with the spatial 'outline' of a memory versus direct experiential memory (this is in relation to visual recognition disorders) in various talks and publications. Sacks himself had prosopagnosia (face recognition blindness).

I can imagine sound, smell, taste, and spatial. I can place imagines in the room like they are 3D and rotate them. Everything is in color and I can change its color at random. It’s almost like I t’s advanced minds eye. The only one I can’t do is sinestesia. I was just diagnosed with ADHD last week. I knew I was dyslexic for years. I used to day dream constantly as a kid and it was automatic. Which now i hear is a new disorder….. I did manage to shut the automatic part off by being very aware of what I was doing. If you day dream everyday it becomes a habit. Habits are what programs our brains. I often wonder if this is how LotR and Harry Potter were wrote. By constantly imagining places and people. If you watch authors being asked how they did it. They never really tell. Because if they did people would think they’re crazy.

Such a fascinating topic. Thank you for the video!! Even though the video is 3 years old, I‘d like to comment. My husband and I are polar opposites vis a vis Aphantasia. When we first met (20+ years ago) I noticed that he had problems with visualization. I asked him once if he saw pictures in his head; he had no idea what I was talking about. I don‘t know if I am hyperphantasic (if that is the adjective???) but I can see pictures in my head. Visualizing how something will look before it has been built/created is relatively easy for me and impossible for him. I used to draw the distinction between us by saying that he thinks „abstractly“ rather than visually. If you ask him what color our house is, he will be able to answer simply because he KNOWS what color it is; whereas, if someone asks me, a visual of our house pops up in my mind immediately. I am curious though about hyperphantasia, too. I can sometimes reply entire film scenes in my head or take a walk-through in our garden purely in my mind‘s eye. But, the images don‘t stay particularly long and sometimes even take on a life of their own. Is there a scale somewhere out there, a kind of hyperphantasia spectrum? Anyway, great explanations!!! Thanks!

I see nothing.

is that a danish accent im clocking?:) god video! jeg har aphantasia

Great job on this video. You produced some excellent content here. This video helped me develop a model to compare the capacity of visualization btw myself and others. I have realized I have a very strong power of visualization. For instance, I have very long, coherent, and vivid dreams. I can read and see color in my dreams. I remember my dreams. It affects my life otherwise. So I try to explain it to others but it’s difficult to explain to them. Many people don’t consider that other people may have very different capacity for visualization than themselves. So, as long as someone accepts that different people experience cognition differently, it’s easy to understand. If the other person doesn’t acknowledge that it’s possible for others to see the world differently than themselves, it’s possible to talk about those differences and similarities both. Great video, this has been very helpful for me. I appreciate it!

Okay but what if we extend the metaphor until it works lol. i think this is a bit closer: Language is a SERIES of tubes. This tube is characterized by a large sieve at one end, and once language has filled the tube, only a small amount can exit at the sivve end until word-pressure is applied at the speaker end, the main problem being that the friction caused by passing through the sivve at such pressures causes enough heat to induce evaporation. So, In order to sufficiently catch the language, the listener must aim the listening-end of the tube almost directly against the sivve-end of the speaking tube, and creative negative pressure inside the listening receptacle in order to maintain suction. Proper use of this technique generally results in an thought-transmission-rate of 0-25%.

I believe that me and my sister have a somewhat odd combination of features in that we can "project" whatever it is that we use instead of visual imagery (we are both aphantasic). I've been calling this "Kinesthetic Thinking" because it seems to come from the same part of my awareness as my awareness of my body. I've been doing a test on my friends/family where i start by asking them to imagine a cup, and then i ask questions about that cup (is there anything other than the cup, can you pick the cup up? can you stand up and walk away from the cup?). Many people close their eyes to do this, and i make sure not to specify whether they should close their eyes, because some do not. The people who do not close their eyes tend to be able to project their imagery out to some extent, but me and my sister are both aphantasic, and we don't close our eyes. When asked to visualize something, we tend to look slightly up (45-50 degrees), eyes open, and imagine the object in that space, almost as if it was on a movie screen. If asked, we can imagine the object in another place, but its more challenging and feels unnatural. I do occasionally use this process though, without prompting, to imagine objects in physical space.

VVIQ = hyperphantastic SUIS - I have no idea if I do any of it *always* I gave up.

I just found out about hyperphantasia and that I have it which explains SO much about my life. As a kid I was a daydreamer so in class I was imagining that I was exploring other planets and it was like I was playing VR... in the 90s... I was walking around in these fantasy planets looking around at these really cool plants and animals. I think the creator of Avatar did the same thing because the world of avatar has a similar vibe to the planets I saw as a kid with the purple, pink and turquoise hues. I think the artist Kim Jung Gi also had hyperphantasia because in some interviews he mentioned imagining an object and turning it to a cooler angle and the way he could draw a large super detailed scene like he was there in the moment really feels like he must have had it. I recommend checking out his work if you are curious because he was extraordinary.

I created a new test, Called “When Doves Cry” What you do is listen to “When Doves Cry” and in the first line where he asks “Dig if you will a picture,” If you in-fact, Do see a picture, You have Hyperphantasia

‘Spacial imagery’? I am curios. Spacial would seem to require a ‘mental starting place’. Be well.

Many can definitely prime themselves to see certain colors. Just look at how some people study & write important points in different colors to make studying easier. I even go a far and having a photo in my head of the colorful notes I’ve taken & can read the red points or blue, etc. later on if that knowledge is needed in the future.

my minds eye is like a really bad 2009 youtube video recorded in a dark room. not. great but man i can sure see that apple!

There is no picture in my mind for me to look at. It’s not there for me to ‘see’ but at the same time I can imagine an elephant in pyjamas or a clown with blue hair or whatever. I just have the concept somehow I can’t describe how. So is that what people mean with their minds eye or do they actually see something? It’s so hard to tell! I go back and forth on if my experience counts as seeing or not.

We all here inner voices when reasoning about languages, see internal images when reasoning about geometric ideas, hear music as numbers and colors. It's just called thinking.

I had a boyfriend who claimed not to have an imagination. I didn't get it. I've always had an incredibly vivid imagination (and synesthesia).

Thanks so much for this video ❤