Why Some People Don't Have A "Mind's Eye" | Random Thursday
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- Опубликовано: 20 окт 2021
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What do you "see" in your mind's eye? Is it as real as looking at a photo? Or do you not see any images at all? It turns out there are 3-5% of the population who don't have the ability to form images in their heads. It's a condition called "Imagination blindness" or Aphantasia, and it was only recently discovered.
Along with Aphantasia is the opposite end of the spectrum, Hyperphantasia, where the mind's eye is so vivid, it's hard to distinguish between what's real and what's imagination.
It opens up a lot of questions about how we see and perceive our world.
Here are links to the tests to determine where you fall on the spectrum:
SUIS:
psyarxiv.com/j2h8k/download
OSIQ:
www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/mkozh...
VVIQ:
aphantasia.com/vviq/
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LINKS LINKS LINKS:
aphantasia.com/what-is-aphant...
www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/sc...
www.bbc.com/news/health-34039054
www.sciencefocus.com/the-huma...
www.quora.com/What-are-the-ad...
talkinghumanities.blogs.sas.a...
aphantasia.com/binocular-riva...
www.simplypsychology.org/perc...
www.popsci.com/science/articl...
elifesciences.org/articles/50232
aphantasia.com/shocking-insig... 
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I've been telling my friends for years that I cannot picture things in my mind. They always seemed dumbfounded by the idea, but if you asked me to picture a house with a red door, my mind would just say the words "a house with a red door" there's no actual image in my head. What's weird is on the rare occasion that I do remember my dreams, which is extremely rare, my dreams are extremely vivid, so somehow my unconscious mind can picture things, but my conscious mind can't.
Exactly the same for me. Do you also struggle with conceptualizing written stuff, often having to reread it multiple times because you cant visualize what its saying? Just curious because your experiences seemed similar to mine
@@AnyrArisen413 constantly! Reading was a nightmare for me growing up because when I read I'm literally just saying the words on the page in my head, and if I happen to also be thinking about what I'm going to have for lunch I would find that I've read a whole page, but haven't actually payed attention to what I was reading.
@@timchallenge This seems relevant to your last statement. I want to comment more but I'm too tired to say anything of substance. If either of y'all watch it and get something out of it, please let me know! 💞
ruclips.net/video/wfYbgdo8e-8/видео.html
Same here. I didn’t realize until a few years ago that when someone “pictured” something that they could actually see something.
When I dream it’s much more about feeling the feelings of what’s going on, never actual pictures.
@@TikiStanford That's so fascinating to me, almost like an entirely different mental processing of reality. What did you make of the advice to "picture the audience naked" prior to learning about this?? 🤭
For me, "picturing" something while awake is much like a Van Gogh, all the details are there but "hazy" or "fuzzy", very obviously not reality. Smells, tastes, temps, and feelings are there but also dampened, sound is perfectly clear. The only caveat is picturing schematics, designs, blueprints, ect.. those are usually 2D and accurately pictured. Dreams are an entirely different story, they are perfect renditions of reality, even if what I'm dreaming about is absurd or something I've never seen, it looks same as it would through my eyes while awake, including temperatures, tastes, smells, sounds, and feelings. Considering I have ptsd related night terrors, it's not as great as it sounds.
>Food for thought - Veterans deployed to the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts have a 11 to 20% chance of developing PTSD (209,000 to 380,000)/1,900,000; 17% of Veterans who served in active combat have reported PTSD. These numbers are higher for earlier wars, and it very often goes undiagnosed & untreated. Some of these Veterans will have perfectly vivid night terrors, literally seeing and experiencing things as if it's real life with the added horror of whatever their imagination can create. Please keep this in mind whenever you next encounter this subject.
💞Feed love, starve hate.
This was a life-changing video for me. I'm 61 and I had never of this, I always thought when people talked about seeing images in their head it was hyperbole. I totally have aphantasia and I fit all the characteristics that you mentioned and I have a very strong inner-monologue. This explains so many things about me, both good and bad. Thank you so much for making this video.
It is great knowing you're not alone.
Yup! I got to know about the term after watching this video! Do you misplace things like keys often? :-D
NPC.
Indeed, I don't have aphantasia (internal monologue and the whole kit and kaboodle) but I've met at least one in my time that I used to play rpgs with.
Yeah but picture this...
I have aphantasia and I can see hazy things in my mind, but I can't imagine new things. If you described an animal to me that I'd never seen before, I would have no mental image of it. If you asked me to picture my partner's face, I wouldn't really see it so much as a fuzzy outline and a list of attributes. I still dream in images, although interestingly my dreams are usually not photorealistic. I've always loved reading but I found it ridiculous when people said that reading a book was like seeing a movie in your mind, until I learned that it's because most people actually do see something in their head when they read. It blows my mind that people can actually see things in their head like that; it seems almost like a super power to me and it's so cool.
I'm addicted to reading but I've never seen the situations described. I always thought people were, at best, exaggerating when they said they could mentally see the things happening. I can think about what's happening in a book, I can debate mentally about what I'd do, but (eg) no matter how good the description is I can't see the places or the people.
I can turn 3D shapes in my head and see finished products that I am working on. Reading is fun, because you become part of the story. What helped me to train this part of my mind is to listen to story books on tape when I was young. Then Old Time Radio shows here on RUclips. You mind can be opened to a certain level of picture forming if it is worked like a muscle. TV has ruined so many imaginations, because it's all there, no work required.
This ability varies a lot I think, I'd be curious what other people's experiences are with reading specifically. I'm not aphantastic, and have a pretty good visual memory, but I almost never get automatic visual images from a book. Unless I concentrate for a few seconds, I can't bring to mind an image of a character or scene, and when I stop concentrating and get back in the flow of reading, I lose track of the image. Especially with characters, I can't automatically recall what I thought they looked like the last time I tried to picture them. I'm a bit better with locations, but I often need to re-read fight scenes or other highly dynamic situations so I can track the orientation of characters within space and follow the action. I do *sometimes* get automatic imagery, but it's rare. That said I'm pretty terrible at drawing and very good at repairing stuff and other spatial reasoning tasks so perhaps it's just a matter of habit and practice.
It seems miserable to not be able to do this I but I guess you've learnt to live with it
I'm not a Hyperfantasiac, but i can imagine things good enough. When my mind's free i even built a fantasy world where i'm the main character with magic power. I tried putting those onto a paper once, but i realized that i can't write for sh1t. So, well. There's that.
Sometimes, that fantasy even bleeds into my dream. I lucid dream often-ish (not often enough for my liking) and so, i have quite many opportunity to live out my fantasy in my dream as well. Lucid dreaming is also a very good tool to escape your nightmare or sleep paralysis. I just had a nightmare yesterday about a Paop or ปอป in my language. A Paop is a folk creature typically of a middle age to old age woman. The one i saw in my dream was an old short white-haired woman. They're creature that likes to eat the innards of all things from chicken to people. She came for me, but i realized i was in a dream and so, i just copy Wanda's power from Marvel and simply fly away from there.
As someone who has maladaptive daydream disorder and will just switch out of reality to daydream like 75% of my day, funnily enough, this is extremely difficult to imagine.
That day dreaming thing Joe described happens to me everytime I sit still for to long, it's like my mind goes "I'm bored now, let's think up some interesting scenarios and play through them."
2 hours down a rabbit hole burning through cycles on my organic quantum computer I catch myself and realize I'm now in 0.00000000000001% likelyhood territory
@Avocado Toastsame, plus I usually like to think out loud as opposed to using my inner monologue, idk why lol. Just a blank and empty head up here
Same. I 'wrote' whole novels that way, from romance, to fantasy, to world domination.
EDIT: Oh, but never in first person, actually. I always maintain an outside perspective, even when I imagine myself in situations.
@Avocado Toast oof
Literally cried myself to sleep daydreaming about a tragic event as if it happened to me.
This seems like something we should test children on, so we can support them in their learning processes
It would be, yet the education system still struggles helping students with dyslexia
It's quite often present in neurodivergent people I think, so yeah, it would benefit everyone.
@@evaavi4412 you think someone without a mind's eye could accidentally be pronounced neurodivergent?
@@SkittlesInYourHand I think more than just aphantasia should go into being pronounced as ND, but I guess you can point at aphantasia and call it a different brain setting too if that makes sense. I said the previous comment because I've noticed a lot of ND people have it.
I support that up to the point where kids can understand themselves better. However I definitely do not support telling them that if they have a good visual inner eye (so they are good on those rotated thing tests) then they have less talent to I don't know, maths.
Especially that I can do both well.
And I have a verbal inner monologue only when I have to use language, but not when doing math or looking at a painting.
I just learned about this a few months ago. It explains so much. I always thought those “visualization” meditation exercises were so stupid! I don’t see a beach or my “happy place” when I close my eyes. Now I know that most people actually can and their experience with the exercise is completely different. I thought everyone else was bs-ing me when they said they felt more relaxed afterwards.
Mental Visualization is all about recalling bits and pieces of stuff you've seen before and stitching them together. For example a 'beautiful beach', I would recall fine sands, clear water, blue sky, coconut trees and put them together to form a mental scene on my mind. But as soon as I'm not thinking about 'beach', it goes away. Like the things you can recall, when you are not thinking about it, it won't come up to your mind. And mental imageries are NEVER SUPER HD CRYSTAL CLEAR LIKE A MOVIE, people are always exaggerating unknowingly because we are mostly bad at describing things, especially what we "see" in our mind. If you want to know how mental images look, try placing your hand near your face, look at it, blink your eyes for maybe 30 seconds (focus while blinking and let the image of your hand be absorbed by your brain) and finally after blinking for 30 seconds or more shut your eyes tight and try to RECALL what you just saw right in front of your eyes for the past 30 seconds. I hope you see a fuzzy mental image of your hand in your mind. If you don't, try this blinking exercise for 1 minute or longer. Remember to focus on your hand as you blink your eyes and try hard to visualize it immediately when, you shut your eyes. Also Take note, I'm Not saying you can SEE when your eyes are shut, I'm talking about what your mind can Recall how your hands look the exact moment right after you stop blinking and shut your eyes. If you can recall a fuzzy memory image of your hand, you are doing it right. Let me know if it works. 😉
Yeah same here, years of not understanding how anyone got anything out of the "relaxing beach meditation to sleep to", until I recently discovered that other people have a literal image in their heads instead of basically just the thoughts and logical understanding of what the beach might be like, with a black image to accompany it. My mind was blown.
@@LeeHobbies it's NOT a "literal image"...
Read my comment above... It's like recalling some one who touched you. You don't really get that "touch" feeling, you just recall mentally how that sensation was like.
Same with mental images, it's mostly fuzzy recollection of things you saw before, but good enough. And when we imagine things, for example, 'a nice day at the beach'. We are just recalling a blue sky, the sea, the sand and the beach chair etc.. at the same time. Thus it forms an imagination on the mind, of a beach.
@@supertuesday600 I see what you're saying, but I can't get an imagination in my mind of a beach, not visually, just sort of ideas without imagery. I can't picture in my mind my best friend, I can sort of know what he looks like, I can remember photo's but they jump around in fractions of a second, but I can't close my eyes and visualise him. It's like a black screen with scratchy lines trying to form. I can easily use my "minds ear" to hear peoples accents no problem in my head, I can think in any accent a person I've heard had. Sometimes I get stuck with my internal monologue being the voice of an audiobook narrator (thanks Toby Longworth). For visualising though, I can remember moments as a memory, but I can't form an imagination image at all, if I try it's just blackness and scratches.
Also, sorry but I think I accidentally posted my initial reply to your comment when it was meant for one further down so I'd not even read your comment. I appreciate your input though, this has been a new and only slightly unwelcome discovery for me. I've got to half a century without it being an issue and it's not going to be an issue now.
i always thought it was metaphorical or hyperbole… thank you so much for making this video. I’ve seen this video multiple times and it still makes me a little emotional because it is such an unknown concept to teachers, parents, and kids. I never knew that most people literally see things in their head. In school I would get so frustrated trying to describe what I “pictured” when I was reading a passage from a book… the idea of “picturing” didn’t make much sense to me. I really wish I knew what it was like to see images or events play out in my head… reading the comments makes me feel so understood and normal
May I ask how you dream? Do you still dream in visual dreams or does it work different for you?
@@joana2135 for me personally, I do still dream visually. Usually I can’t recall my dreams anymore tho because the SSRI medication I take seems to affect my dreaming. When I can recall them tho, they can actually get pretty vivid and I can lucid dream
I don’t think the lucid dreaming is really related tho. But I either can’t remember my dreams or they are super vivid nightmares
My late partner didn't really like comics a whole lot because he found that processing the image and the text together just felt alien to him. Do you have a feeling like that?
@@tav.bassboi if you can remember the way something felt, smelled, or tasted, it’s just like that but with vision
@@andrewparker318 Its thoughtful of you to share your to explanation with him.
My inner voice constantly talks, especially when I'm trying to sleep
My inner voice nags when I try to sleep. An endless to do list
My inner voice can change to another voice if i focus a bit, like my voice but in other language or a person i know and chat sometimes.
@@Bildgesmythe constantly
@Ysabela no
@@pros_0143 For some weird reason for as long as I remember, my inner voice sounds like a slightly female version of my voice. In fact I rely on it to read, and thought everyone read with an inner voice until recently, explaining to me how it's possible for people to speed-read. No speed-reading for me though, I rely on my inner voice to read. But I don't need my inner voice at all to think.
I have aphantasia!! I always explain it to people this way: say you’re reading a book and they’re explaining a scene or a person. There’s no actual picture, but you’ve got a sense of what’s there. That’s exactly how all things are stored in my brain.
how far does this non-imagination goes? if you read "blue circle" you know what is blue and circle but nothing appear or happen in the mind?
for me its the opposit i visualise alot, its almost like a second desktop i alt tab, and it can be dangerous to forget reality if day dreaming
Except when reading a book and a scene or person is described (funny how you used the word explained; that could also be related to aphantasia) most people do imagine an actual picture.
Are you any good at mechanical engineering?
I can imagine ICE engine pistons, valves and stuff very vividly, and if someone explains about an alternative way or a "new part", I can imagine it working.
At work, I use it to my advantage so I wonder how do you do it if you "can't see it"?
@@MassMultiplayer for me, if I am reading something that I have physically seen before like a blue circle I can kinda remember the circle I saw, but if it is explaining something I have never seen in real life or a person, this especially true for fantasy books with creatures, I cannot put the description to an image and it is just blank. It's probably why I like fantasy movies and games, it gives me an image to put to a description.
What is "a sense of what's there"? For me I would see what's there. Is the sense like a feeling or sound or is it like a sense independent of the 5 senses? Is it just somehow like raw knowledge? 🤔
I work in architecture. One of my architect coworkers has aphantasia. I have hyperphantasia. The different ways that we each approach design is something I try to pay close attention to so that I can better figure out how to convey information without relying too much on abstract descriptors.
Thank you so much for covering this. I always thought people were bs-ing when they imagined things in their head, because I've never been able to see anything in my mind's eye. I found out about a year ago that aphantasia existed, and it struck me so deeply and I finally felt seen (lol). Thanks for bringing attention to this neat difference!
Do you relate to these personality preferences that go with aphantasia? ruclips.net/video/QFO7GORmKfI/видео.html
Yes me too! I also thought people were exaggerating when they said they saw images in their mind.
Is it okay that I imagined a hotdog? The Buns are perfectly cut, cheddar cheese melted on both sides, hotdog slides in between with the same size of the Buns, a nice continuous squiggly line of mustard across and some fined onions sprinkled across
It's ok, but also not ok.
Are you korean? :D
You're not the only one that thought of hotdogs haha, so don't feel bad I'm hungry as a hobo and immediately thought of hotdogs. But the Nathan brand not great value.
Well you dont have aphantasia
That was ok untill the mustard 🤮
I realised I have Aphantasia a couple of months ago. I'm in my 50's so it came as quite a shock that when people say to 'visualise' things' they actually meant it!! I do feel I've been missing out on something helpful and fulfilling in life so I'm going to try some of the exercises I've read about to see if I can kick start some type of mental images no matter how poor they may be. Wish me luck ;-).
Good Luck Neil!
a lot of us aphants can still dream in pictures, so id recommend if you can, try to wake up a bit earlier and lay in bed to try and remember your dreams for a while. i did this for a long time, maybe 3-4 months. and now if im super focused, dark room no external stimuli and am calm i can some faint outlines of things. it literally varies on a day by dat basis and its super weird, on rare occasions ive been able to see a very faint picture of like, an icecream cone, and to "verify" if i knew i was actually seeing it, i tried to rotate it around on a few axis' and it worked. was an odd experience
This is why I love reading books. It’s really hard to describe but it’s literally like a movie in my head, and I’m in the movie itself. I see each character in detail, they each have their own voice in my head, and I just zone out while reading. It’s kinda trippy like I’m reading the words but it’s more so just a constant movie going on.
I used to enjoy reading too but I never 'saw' anything in my mind! When I was younger I read picture books and now I understand why my love for books disappeared so quickly,
Because I started to read books without illustrations.
I was forced to read more for school, which I already hated and none of the books I was allowed to read even interested me. I still read all the time, but I only read visual novels like Ace Attorney or other videogames that don't have voice-acting, because I enjoy voicing the characters myself!
I was my whole life closer to hyperphantasia than aphantasia. I relate to moving or gesturing in real life the same as in fantasy. Sometimes had a problem cause my imagination was so "loud" I wasn't sure if I didn't actually say something out loud.
What's interestin (well, sad for me) is the fact that after having a major deprressive episode for almost 4 years, I lost some mental capacity, I'm not as intelligent, can't focus, my memory is faulty and also I can barely use my mind's eye anymore. I used to watch movies in my mind and really feel them. Now I have a problem with imagining familiar faces. That could be actually studied. what happenned to my brain during depression.
As someone with Long Term Severe Depressive Condition I really relate to what you said about losing mental ability. I can read a description, maybe of a political theory, or a debatable subject and *know* I could have understood it years ago but can't now. If I re-read, slowly, maybe take notes I can absorb enough info to fake it, but I still don't really understand. I'm sixty so I've been stressing about dementia. I don't know if I'm comforted or more stressed by what you describe but it's interesting.
@@bilindalaw-morley161 major depression neurologically works the same as dementia, the causes are different and technicaly when you have depression it can be somewhat reversed.
I know for a fact I am not capable of understanding things as well as I could prior to the onset of my long-term major depressive disorder.
Wait no I literally have the same experience as u I used to be able to visualize to the point where I'd have whole shows I'd make myself that I'd watch in my head esp b4 going to sleep but then my depression kicked in hard-core and I can't even visualize in my mind something like an apple
When I was a teenager I always wondered why I could never imagine the girl(s) I had a crush on apart from maybe their hair and eye color
Interesting, I can visualise animals plants and objects, but not people. At school my friends were people who were fairly visually distinctive. I also have difficulty recognising people out of the context in which I usually see them.
Sorry man. I feel your pain I’m with you
Same here. Thank goodness we live in a time with photos else our loved ones faces would be gone. I discovered I had this just a few months back, I'm 44. It freaked me out. I have since spent a huge amount of time trying to train my brain to see. My daughter, 14, has it too. Within days she was able to start visualizing, so I think if you catch it early it maybe easier to develop. Imagine without seeing walking through your house for example. I'd never tried, its freaky. I suspect most with aphantasia have the spacial imagination. Look at a ball, close your eyes, you may not be able to see it but if you are like me you can grab it with ease, which again is freaky.
Thank goodness we live in a time with photos else our loved ones faces would be gone. I discovered I had this just a few months back, I'm 44. It freaked me out. I have since spent a huge amount of time trying to train my brain to see. My daughter, 14, has it too. Within days she was able to start visualizing, so I think if you catch it early it maybe easier to develop visualization. Imagine without seeing walking through your house for example. I'd never tried, its freaky. Why would I ever try to imagine anything when I cant see it. I suspect most with aphantasia have spacial imagination. Look at a ball, close your eyes, you may not be able to see it but if you are like me you can grab it with ease, which again is freaky. Clearly our brains are storing all the sensory information else we would be surprised by everything when we see it. If something changes, we know. It's all there we just have not used our brains in such a way. I have since been able to hold onto visuals momentarily when I close my eyes, remember colors, and when meditating can see faintly. The entire way I think has changed. Before when I thought of an apple I would think of the concept of an apple, never a specific apple. One morning I woke up and everything I thought about I was thinking about visually, but not literally seeing it. Alexa said it was Steve Martins birthday and my head thought of his face, I imagined the echo dot and thought that's strange why am I not visualizing the older version, which then immediately visualized. It started to rain and I was imagining looking down at the roof and could sort of visualize the rain bouncing off the shingles. Incredible. Occasionally I'll get a flash of a vivid image. Oddly what I'm visualizing when I meditate is not even what I'm necessarily thinking about. For example I literally saw a faint stone column covered in ivy and I have no idea why, just popped into my head while thinking of other things.
@@doggygaming950 Face blindness is partially genetic. I remember on one occasion when my father was picking me up from an after school event neither of us recognised each other until he spoke.
No dog as I'm one of those unlucky buggers with aphantasia (I've had it for my whole life however didn't realise until I was 29) haha. I can "feel" the concept of a dog and get a loose data stream of what dogs are/like via inner monologue but no image. Funnily enough I'm quite thankful for aphantasia as it came with a number of advantages when it comes to abstract thinking, information processing and well it sort of made me immune to bad/annoying/cringe memories as I can't get flashbacks or intrusive thoughts. I also attribute aphantasia to my inability to become depressed/get PTSD or even feel sadness/feel down for long (please note this isn't all people with aphantasia). Due to a lack of visual memory I also tend to live in the now as opposed to the past/future. What you mentioned about describing people/places is so correct. I can describe personalities far easier than the way they look. My thought process is pretty much 100% active and ego-driven inner monologue + emotion based. Dreams are also abstract and thought based (but still very profound and vivid). I even enjoy lucid dreaming regularly.
Oh shiiit, so do you like have dreams where you contemplate existence with yourself? (I had several of those and I also have a weak imagination)
Being at the other end of the spectrum this sounds blissful to me.
@@ricardasist All the time. Dreams often feel as real as reality. This can sound strange as there is no visual component but for me visual information isn't overly important. It doesn't give me much outside of using it to navigate the 3D world. I find a lot more value in audio, data and proprioception. More often than not my dreams are very obvious conversations between my conscious self and subconscious self (can't make it sound less woo-woo sorry). I often come out of dreams feeling like a certain life/work problem has been figured out and sometimes dream with a sped up dialogue/narration of what is happening. I passively lucid dream (accidently become aware I'm dreaming and lead it) most nights and actively lucid dream (actively choose to become aware of my dream) a few times a week. Oh and I've never really had a super scary nightmare (guess that's because I literally can not visualise bad things happening to me). Might be giving too much info here but I find the phantasia spectrum to be a really interesting and lesser studied area of neuro-diversity. Perhaps people are curious.
If you ask me to think of something sad/depressing I really struggle to and it feels so far and abstract. Almost as if it isn't connected to my thought (even when I think of traumatic events they feel like data/part of my story but not real real).
@@captainfrosty31 Honestly, most of my hyperphantasic friends say the same. I know I should feel like I'm missing out however the concept of having bad/negative images in the mind (which you can not control) sounds horrifying. So I guess it does count as sort of "blissful". The main downside of my aphantasia is I literally can't imagine my GF, passed family or even holidays/happy memories. Everything I think about/do is either in the now or the abstract future. The past sort of doesn't exist.
@@captainfrosty31 I don't have eidetic memory, but even in my 60s, it's really sharp for sights and sounds, numbers and statements, pictures and moving images. Apparently, I'm outstanding at color matching.
Weird, huh? I always figured it was all the free space between my ears. My mom was that way until her death in her 80s and her mom did museum-grade restoration work on really valuable collections.
I can attest to this as a REALTOR. I would say it is more like 75% of folks cannot use their minds eye to even envision a Red wall painted a neutral color or see a wall being removed from a home. This is why when I list a home I edit and stage my listings to show the buyer exactly what they need to see to fall in love.
I think in words, not pictures. When asked to picture a dog I think of a golden retriever type dog with shaggy reddish fur but I don’t “see” anything. It’s just like a default generic list of dog features that pops up but not an image. Same with an apple, I can think of an outline and assign a color but I don’t hold an image in my mind. I am not good at realistic drawing and can remember names/numbers easily but wouldn’t recognize a person that I’d recently met. It’s annoying haha but I’m a photographer and it’s cool to be able to create art from the vast darkness of my mind and see it come together on paper.
I’ve never felt so normalised after watching this. I always thought I was crazy when people would tell me they could visualise things and I could never get anything in my head or understand what people were trying to explain things. Thank you for this video I’ll have to do my own further research but now I have a reason that explains what I’ve been so lost on for so long
Interesting. For me it's the opposite. I can figuratively and literally imagine a whole universe inside my head (or at least a galaxy).
@@jumpander Same here, I can imagine pretty much anything if I try hard enough, a whole new life that would feel just as really as this reality
Ah yes I remember that feeling of enlightenment. Still blows my mind most other people can just see stuff in their head lmao
@Jumpanda @SunbeanCat To be honest I do wish I could visualize. I feel like I have a terrible memory and ever since I found out about aphantasia I felt it may explain why I've always felt so detached from the memories of my past. So yeah, it must be nice being able to picture stuff, I envy you
@@jumpander i have this recurring imagination in my mind where i was the MC of a story whose rule a large part of the world as an Immortal Emperor (sometimes rules Mars even, but. That one got scrubbed from my mind due to i prefer a more realistic approach of an Imperial regime with an Immortal Emperor at the helm with "the now" technology not "the too futuristic" ones) . I tried to put it onto paper like writing a novel of somekind, but. That's not my expertise, so it's pretty much only stuck in my head at this point.
I could imagine a simple item in front of me like a an apple the more complex the item are harding to imagine fully have to break it down in parts
Thank you Joe. I had a stroke in 2019. I went from having a minds eye to Aphantasia state. Now i no longer remember how my parents look etc. Yet I know who they are in sight.
Yeah, I realize that even though I can't recall how people look, I can recognize them instantly, so it's not an inhability to remember people, but to visualize them.
@@EmiCheese a couple questions to you and OP:
1. How are your dreams? Talking? Sounds? Both or nothing?
2. Do you have intrusive thoughts?
3. How do you recall memories of events compared to recalling facts and information?
4. Do you have a inner monologue, a "narrator" or nothing?
Same here i have TBI
I hope you made a god recovery
@@klittlet I can only recall some auditory voices. I can hear someone like Morgan Freeman or James earl jones but most are gone now. Occasionally I get surges of memories. For instance lately French words I learned I grade school now coming back. Occasionally I switch words like tornado vs volcano.
Wow! It took half the video before I realised I have hyperphantasia. I realised when you mentioned about continuing a dream when you wake up… If I wake up during a dream I’m enjoying I literally close my eyes and take myself back to where I was when I woke up and just continue the dream consciously… and I love doing it because I have so much control and can literally play like a movie in my head!
…I am late to work a lot though.
I discovered that I had aphantasia and also lacked an internal monologue on Reddit some time ago. Finding that out was mind blowing because expressions like "I can't hear myself think" never seemed literal to me until I found out that people have an actual voice in their head.
I did a bit of a deep dive at that time and learned a lot about the condition but watching this video you really seem to have nailed every aspect. I'm quite good at remembering facts (trivia games are a breeze, for instance) but have a lot of trouble recalling specific aspects of other people's faces. The description about the man trying to remember his fiancee and saying, "I'm not describing an image that I'm looking at, I'm remembering features about her" is absolutely spot-on. If you asked me to picture an elephant in a pink tutu on a unicycle I couldn't do it, but if you asked me to describe one so that you could draw it I could craft the individual characteristics as a I went to be able to create a picture for you.
That all said, I'm not sure about the positives. I also have ADHD so I definitely lack the concentration skills and that condition also tends to bring anxiety disorders with it, so not a lot of "being present" for me most of the time. I do have an engineering degree though so maybe I fit the bill on the "high abstract reasoning." Definitely get lost when people try to give me directions ("right at the light, past the second oak tree, etc...").
In any case, thank you for making this video. It's still something I'm learning more about all the time and I always love the discussion it provokes in people.
Oh wow I cannot imagine my ADHD without inner monologue
I honestly thought that seeing things with your minds eye was all fictional in movies and books 💀 didn’t think people had it that good
Me too!
That’s why some people don’t listen to sources that call everything woo-woo! Lol there’s always a middle ground... if you’re not in someone’s body how can you really know what their brain is perceiving
So did I, I always thought people were just exaggerating to brag about how imaginative they are or just kinda lying, not in a nefarious way or anything though.
Same! I just learned this like 3 weeks ago
Seems that's typically how folks with aphantasia interprets that.
When I was a kid, I thought artists were magical because they could remember what things looked like when they weren't looking right at them. I had no idea that it wasn't a special ability, lol.
Most of us have the ability. Some just concentrate on developing it more fully. It is like exercising. Lift weights and you get stronger.
@@mikeholloway2625 as an artist , i approve.
It takes time but you start to remember the strokes and how-to's for certain parts such as an Eye or a buff chest
All through high school I tried with all of my might to become a visual artist but I could never get the idea from my head onto the paper until the teacher would help then I could go and fill in all the blanks but now I know why
actually a lot of artists have aphantasia. like 70% of disney's animators
@@randomassortmentofthings I'd say the opposite is true. I don't have aphantasia, but after watching this video, I would put myself relatively close to it on the spectrum. I always got really good grades in art class, to the point where I was encouraged to study some form of it such as graphic design. My dirty secret was that I was only good at portrays, I was extremely good at drawing or painting things that I could see in front of me. Creating images from my imagination felt mentally exhausting and they would turn out MUCH less vivid. Over time I was able to "fake" halfway decent results by reducing my imagined picture to one detail at a time and, as described by others above, memorising strokes and concepts that I knew could work. However, this patchwork method had limitations and the result wouldn't entirely be in my control. For example, once I had drawn an imagined character, I would not be able to recreate that character from different angle such that they would be recognisable as the same character. I was also really terrible at drawing in a comic style, which is something I would have loved to be able to do. Comics require singling out a few characteristics of an imagined item or face and capturing them with a few minimalist strokes. I just didn't have enough control over my imagined picture to be able to do that.
Thankfully I didn't study art, I studied mathematics instead.
I imagined the quintessential golder retriever, With the derpy look and everything.
When I “visualize” I can create a vivid “perception” of whatever I want, I can move/rotate/position/animate it within the world, but none of it renders itself in my visual field. Kind of like it’s in a separate layer in a drawing program that’s hidden, so the representation is still there but it can’t block the real visual data behind it or be mistaken for a real object.
For the dog example, I imagined my husky, the black and white fur patterns on her face and body, the way she looks around and moves. I can color swap her fur to red and blue, change her dimensions, swap out parts of other animals, change the setting she’s in. I could describe or draw this imagined “image”, but wouldn’t be able to visually see it until I created the drawing. When I close my eyes, all I “see” is blackness, but the imagination “layer” is still fully available. However, when I dream, I do “see” my dreams.
I do have an inner monologue, which is just me speaking, similar to if I actually said it out loud. But if I imagine other people, I can give them their own speech and play it out like a tv show. But they have no more weight in my thoughts than a real person speaking would. My own inner monologue is always still the “me” in control of my own thoughts.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while since seeing other videos or articles about Aphantasia, so I’ve had time to work out how to describe my experience.
Well, when I close my eyes I can actually see the image I'm working on, but otherwise that rather precisely describes my 'mind's eye' right there. Mine is quite definitely a separate data layer, or maybe zone, from what my physical senses provide (yes, I can include sound, smell, taste, and touch). Sure, I knew that mine was more pronounced than most people's, but I never thought it was that rare or that much greater.
I can do the same thing I also can control my dreams and I can stop and start them whenever and when I close my eyes even during the day I can replay my dreams I can describe any dream I want in detail no matter how long after
I meant I can do the same thing and I can also control my dreams
Same but not vivid, the details and things apper if i think of them specifically, if I don't they remain general, no details nor life-like, like a hologram or ghosts in movies. No monologue though, mine is more like a dialogue... Go figure.
This video is extremely enlighting to me, i never understood how the hell counting sheep was suppose to help me sleep but now that I know other people actually see a sheep makes sense to me lol.
Say what ?! Wow. I've only seen the cartoons of sheep jumping over peoples heads. I don't get HOW they see the sheep :/
I thought the point of counting sheep was that it is so boring.
Boring, boring, boring ... I'm feeling sleepy.
Omg i just wrote this! It was so confusing for years...
Haha!
im not sure if it actually helps anybody sleep, at least i have a "minds eye" but imagining jumping sheep doesnt do anything
This is kind of crazy, I never realized others actually see real images. I can't actually see the faces of my own kids, I only know specific features.🤯
even in my dreams, every single character is faceless, but i know who they are
sometimes though, i will for some reason or another realize that the person has no face in my dream, and then i wake up in a cold sweat
Yep faces are the hardest too. I can kind a sorta do super simple shapes but faces are impossible. Take a lot of pictures of your kids and friends and family. It makes it harder to even recognize people. My dad died February and I just pulled up some pictures last night for the first time since the funeral. Even just in a few months his face was almost unrecognizable.
When Joe talked about it impacting traumatic experiences that is 100% true. The only time I got close to crying was when my grandma arrived. She was just in so much pain. Otherwise its not really affected my mental state in the time since.
I saw a tv show where they interviewed a man who had suffered brain damage in a car accident. It only affected his facial recognition part of his brain. When he saw people, he could see their faces, but couldn’t discern who they were. He tended to look at people’s shoes, he could remember what people’s feet looked like. But I thought it so strange, I couldn’t imagine what that must be like for him.
I kinda have like Photoshop, 3D modeling, movey maker in my head... I can imagine anithing in perfect detail... took me quight a wile to understand not all ppl can. Probably thats why Im an artist lol
Strangest thing I ever discovered about myself. So weird. I think maybe they might be making this up! Lol. How do we KNOW that they see pictures??? That's suspicious! That's weird!
Whoa. Thank you for making this video. I've always had extremely vivid imagery going on in my mind, especially when I was younger. I was never able to focus in class and was always retreating to some weird place in my mind or reliving some experience I'd had. My parents and teachers just assumed that I was mentally disabled somehow. I was put into a special needs classroom until I eventually took an IQ test. When I was put into the gifted program, I was quickly taken out due to my inability to conform to classroom norms. My life has been a constant stream of internal images and internal dialogue that kind of extracted me from the external world. I could go on and on about how weird and sad this has been for me, but I've always known that this was a characteristic that defined my experience of the world. Seriously dude, it's awesome to see this recognized as ... a thing I guess?
I see nothing. Hello aphantasia! Found out about this years ago. It was mind blowing at the time! I honestly thought that "picture this" was a metaphor. Turns out, it isn't. . .
When it comes to trauma I experience it differently than those with a minds eye. I get caught up in the emotions and memories, but thankfully i never have to relive seeing my abusers again. I also think that made it easier to work though it in therapy.
Its insane how fundamentally different people can be, yet we are able to co-operate and empathise with each other. Humans are really amazing.
What is crazy to me is there are some EXCELLENT artists who do hyper-realistic works of art- who have aphantasia. Like... how??
@@juliejanesmith57 I'm no artist, though I do believe I have a pretty deep aphantasia, so perhaps some insight would help; I think that in those cases, the focus of the artist is not on what they see, but what they want to see. They would put it together like a jigsaw puzzle, or like an equation. I want there to be a river and a tree, so I have to have land for the tree, and the river needs to be rooted in the land. So rather than painting an image in their head and putting it on a canvas, they're thinking about what they want to be in the picture and figuring out where each would have to be, and placing it on. If you know you're going to draw a tree, the drawing part requires no mental imagery, since they know what they need to do to make it look good already.
That would be my best guess on it, at least. If I could draw worth two cents, that's how I would go about it.
It's insane to read a comment like this and all your fiber in you is screaming, yea, this is not the experience I had from humans.
People bully those who are fundamentally different...
When I picture a dog, I always see my dog, Kim. Kim entered my life when I was 6 months old. He was a German Shepherd and he was my (step) Dad's guard dog who worked security with him. He taught me to walk, but he also saved my life on several occasions. He was perfect and 40 years after his death I've never met a dog (or Dad) as wonderful as Kim. Kim represents safety, security, and enduring love.
If I may, consider getting another German Shepherd and send it to a Schutzhund (guard dog) trainer. I have a friend that puts *all* of her dogs through schutzhund training, which necessarily includes behavioral and obedience training as well. Some of them have been trained as service dogs, one is a US Marine and served as a search and rescue dog for the SWAT teams in two US states. Even the chihuahua is technically guard dog!
What an absolutely wonderful soul to have been in your life. How blessed you were and are.
For as long as I can remember I have always had the ability to see things so vividly clear in my mind it’s like I’m there. I could imagine a room in full detail and walk around it, even to the point where if I touched something in my mind I could feel it. I’m an artist so when I create characters I can see them in my mind, I even can hear their voice. I also have a really clear voice in my head, almost as if I’m talking to another person. There would be times were when I was younger and was bored in class, I could replay movies I had seen in my head and it was as if I was actually watching them again, from the voices to every little detail of it, I could see it crystal clear. this video really helped me understand about hyperphantasia and I’m coming to the realization that I definitely have it. I always thought everyone could imagine things this clear.
I don’t have any images in my head and I feel left out in a lot of stuff. Like how in school teachers tell the class to “imagine” something. I don’t see anything but I hear it. I daydream by sounds and descriptions.
YES. In school I wish so badly that the teachers, or even anyone at all knew about this. “picturing” a chapter of a book made no sense to me but I never brought it up cause I assumed everyone else thought it was an abstract/figurative concept too
Question: Do you dream in pictures or how does that work for you?
same for me, I can "imagine" a dog, I know what it is, how to describe but I can see it. I may try but I just can't
I can vividly imagine music, so loudly and clearly, sometimes it sounds even better acousitcally in my head then it does in real life.
I can't. I sometimes fake earworms by repeating catchy lyrics few times in my mind while pondering how annoying it would be to actually hear them repeatedly... Then I get bored and move on.
I have this too, I find it is a bit of a curse when I have nightmares, as audio plays a huge part for me personally, and it can also just be generally annoying when you have an earworm because of how clearly you can hear it.
I used to use that as a way to fall asleep, as it is easier to fall asleep to familiar noises, and the fact that i remember a lot of songs from start to end without missing a beat kinda proves that i'm familiar with the material, and it did work many times, sometimes i had to "play" another track, but i'd soon either fall asleep naturally or just from brain overload, haha
Sometimes I play a song in my head and it sounds so kickass and then when I listen to it in real life I'm disappointed.
Same! This is exactly what my brain is like
My inner monologue is selective. I use it when I'm trying to think deliberately with myself or preparing to communicate with people.
Same, and it causes headaches when I use it. I think mainly in images and what I explain as like video clips.
Me too
Yeah! I use the preparation as a dialogue for determining how foolish an action is, as well as thinking about talking with a real person.
If I’m thinking about an idea, I have a monologue where I think of things and then visualize them to work them out, and then figure out what’s wrong using language again.
Yea, same. This comes in especially hard when I play chess. I will be calculating a certain line and talking to myself with perfectly clear dialogue to make myself focus, at least in long games. In bullet chess for example there are no words, just wordless, quick calculations.
@@thorvaldspear what's better?
Heard about this a few years ago and was utterly shocked to find out people can actually see things in their head.
I'm definitely on the aphantasia spectrum - I had a strange experience on Fiver recently where I hired an artist to produce a cartoon character that was half real squirrel and half cartoon - I couldn't really visualize it that well but I knew what I didn't want. So I started working with this artist in Eastern Europe by showing her pictures from other artists and saying what I liked and didn't like about each picture. She worked with these and kept coming up with better and better drafts, and I soon realized she had aphantasia also - she was "seeing what wasn't there" as the Zen Buddhists put it. The final product was fantastic - and neither of us had a visual mind.
I can't see anything in my mind's eye, and didn't realize other people actually could. I remember when I first read about this I talked to my mom about it, and she can see incredibly detailed images in her mind. Me I just have the almost never ending monolog, and random music in my head.
Same way! I can’t even see simple shapes or color, but my inner monologue is almost non-stop!
I have a vivid mind's eye, and music playing all the time in my head, but no monologue or words of any kind.
I can see images in my mind, but I cannot keep them together. There is like a constant unraveling or deformation going on, it's hard to describe. The more I concentrate on maintaining the image the faster it tends to fall apart. It's unnerving.
My mind's eye is almost like me standing at a podium with a room full of people in front of me all of them shouting and trying to tell me what to do trying to be in charge. For some reason I'm the ringleader and I get to listen to them all and then decide what I want to do hopefully they'll let me stay and be the leader and not vote me out and lock me up into cell like I lock up the opposition leader in the back room . anyway I'm not crazy I've been tested.
It just keeps changing for me. When I have to focus on something then my ability to imagine decreases and when I draw something my ability to think critically decreases. The hard part is to regain the imagination and logical thinking when I have lost it. I have to struggle to get them back when I need them.
I saw a golden retriever sitting in a field of grass, zoomed in as if recorded by a camera, with the angle being such that there is no background. He's panting his large tongue out the front of his mouth, resting it on his black lips, only to occasionally retreat it to swallow. It seems happy, and content with it's current predicament, in a way only a dog could.
Literally the exact same
Golden lab came to mind for me too. I feel like this is because it's a poster child of dogs.
Lots of exposure for this dog.
Very interesting. Thank you for sharing the thought.
same here
Same but Black ( I've never owned a Dog)
Similar but in a living room with people in turtle necks playing with him. Probably from a commercial I saw or something.
Holy crap, Bruh you just described me EXACTLY, almost everyone I know is constantly surprised that I can recall conversations that we had months or years ago word for word and can pull facts from thin air on a whim. The keep calling me a walking encyclopedia. Also I should mention that I have never in my living memory had a dream, I close my ey es and then open them however many hours later. This can be somewhat concerning due to the fact that without a clock or other way of keeping time, I can easily dose off if tired for hours and not even notice that time has passed since from all I can tell, I just blinked slightly longer than normal. Im not sure if this is part of this as well but I am apparently an EXTREMELY HEAVY sleeper, like to the point where one time in high school I dozed off on the way home on the bus, and it took my older sister slapping me and banging my head into the window to wake me up which apparently she found hilarious because she knows how hard I am to wake up but apparently the bus driver thought I was having some sort of medical emergency. To me it just seemed one moment i leaned my head against the window and the next moment my sister punched me in the side of my head, so I was a bit upset till I realised I had fallen asleep. I have tons of similar and some even more hilarious stories about places I have managed to snatch a quick nap without noticing but if anyone is genuinely interested tell me below and I'll throw a few more at ya. As it stands I never knew that not being able to 'see' stuff without seeing it was even a concept till i was well into middle school, everyone else apparently does it naturally and so never talks much about it, this has the unfortunate side effect of making a pretty decent writer (In my opinion) but an absolutely appalling artist as anytime I draw something that is not in my vicinity or line of sight om kinda winging it based on characteristics I know. Also the bit about facial recognition is true for me too.
Damn, the way u sleep is how i remember getting anesthesia for a surgery, in one moment i was in the table inhaling the gas and getting ready, then in the next i was fading in getting moved to another room, i wondered "what happened? Did the surgery even happen?" Only when i checked and saw the scar that realised the surgery had indeed already happened, i had never experienced something like that before or since, but apparently for u its just how u sleep, but its nothing like how i or most people sleep, when we sleep we can feel that time has passed, it doesn't feel instant like the anesthesia did, maybe thats because the brain still retains some neuro activity when we sleep, while the way anesthesia works is that it prevents neurons from firing, completely shutting down the whole brain, so what u said about being a heavy sleeper must have something to do with that, your brain shuts down very thoroughly when u sleep than the average person, thus preventing u from even registering that time has passed or from having dreams
@@CupcakeShiny creepy
I saw Kyle, a neighborhood standard poodle, sitting outside the local espresso place, on the grey concrete sidewalk. His head, when siting, is waist height, his curly, tan evenly trimmed coat shifts slightly with his every move and every breath. His doggo face has bright eyes and a happy dog’s gentle pant. He’s very happy being a celebrity of sorts at the coffee house.
0:28 I'm imagining a doggo. I see scattered outlines of one, with some detail near the top of it..but most of it is indescribable concepts. Kinda like how you know wind is there, but you can't see it. I know the dog is being imagined in my mind, but it's hard to 'see'
your brain needs to take an art class
THIS. Is this aphantasia? Or is this how people normally visualize? I'm confused.
I got sort of a wireframe of a dog that got more detail as i focused on a specific area
Aesthics, you described my aphantasia exactly. I think there's an image in my mind, but can't see it. Maybe that's why I love 3d computer modeling.
@@nerdalotdulac8552 it's the hints of a capacity that can be expanded through practice. Like meditation and mind palaces :)
I play out scenarios in my head constantly. Having conversations with different people. I don't know why I do that
that sounded so lonely, some webcam bot tried to help you
thanks! I feel less weird now :)
I do it because of Asperger's. People's emotions are so alien to me that I practice countless options before addressing people. Then lay in bed at night and review my interactions imagining how to improve then next time. But alas, in 40 years I feel I haven't made much progress. I don't know how to prevent people from wanting to hurt me.
does it negatively affect your functioning? if not then you’re normal bro don’t worry
I find it often alleviates frustration. Something annoying happens that has been caused by one person, I imagine various conversation scenarios where I argue with them. The next time I see them, I'm over it enough to not start an argument. Though I might still lose trust in the other person and wish to avoid them more
I can picture a entire book in my head in vivid detail like I'm watching a movie. My ability to picture things in my head is so strong that I can take notes in my head. I also have a robust inner monologue able to be multiple voices so more like a dialogue. Can tell my inner monologue to remind me of something later and it will be able to do it. Can combine both when I try creating a world as I want to write a fantasy book. So can picture characters and have them interact with each other in my head.
The most awful thing this has ever done for me is how badly anti-depressants affected me. Was on them for a few months in middle school for being a introvert and was like turning my brain off. Have some hazy memories of that time but it was truly awful as was like being dead but somehow still alive. As I wasn't a person anymore, I lacked a ego and didn't picture anything in my head or have a inner voice. Vague memory of how I would go to school then sit and go through motions, thankfully I started to fail every class so got taken off anti-depressants.
A dog, a small dog. Not the ankle biters but a small-medium dog. A bichon; curly white hair with some slight brown spots on their back and head, a curled wagging tail, and the biggest smile that told everybody that met their big brown eyes that they loved them. Standing there, looking up and shining with glee. Just happy to be there and happy to be known. Edit: I actually have had false memories- or rather I imagined something and it was so real that for years I thought it was a memory. But it turns out it was just me making something up in my head. So- that's a thing
"I basically have a monty python sketch running in my mind all the time"
Ah, seems I'm not alone.
Same. Almost feels like I'm insane. Sometimes lol.
That sounds nightmarish!
@@onlyonewhyphy
Being a protagonist in a Monty Python skit? Yea, but it's hilarious to tell stories about!
Be thankful it's not a Ren & Stimpy episode.
Surely by definition, you're not alone. 😃
This blew my mind!!! I rely so heavily on visualization I cannot even put it into words. I very much assumed everyone does the same thing so I'm just WOW!!!!!!
Same
I only found out about it cause my son in his 20's found out he had it. His dad has it too. My daughter and I dont have it. I wonder if it is hereditary. Both the men have amazing recall for facts, which we dont have.
I discovered I have aphantasia this past July. Blew my mind that visualization wasn't just a metaphor. I daydream but there are no images with it. I'm so glad to know I'm not alone.
I only recently learned about aphantasia and realized that I have that. I have an MFA in Illustration and am an aspiring author, and for a while I struggled to "imagine things" like other artists might, but I can't. The images I "see" in my head are not really images, it's more like they are feelings of things. I'm also autistic and am highly tactile: I remember the feel of things better than most other things. If I'm told to picture a person running in my mind, it's more like I feel the movement of running, the brush of the wind on skin, etc, but not really see the image. I also struggle with remembering faces, but I can remember what outfit a person was wearing or their favourite hairstyle. Usually I remember the emotion I've associated with a person than anything visual.
Thanks… I now have a name for my inability to imagine stuff. Even though I can plan in my head really quickly, and have very vivid memories of very specific places and traumatic events, I cannot imagine things… like trying to recall now what my wife’s face looks like, or imagining a person I know wearing different clothes than they are in a photo I’m holding of them. This explains why I fail miserably to describe scenes when writing stories, unless I can go to the places I am writing about, or watch tv shows about them.
I never had a dog, but when you said “dog” I immediately imagined a happy golden retriever look up at me
Same
He is out there, waiting for you to get him, to give him a good home....
Why did so many people imagine a golden retriever
I can imagine not having a mind's eye, but I can't imagine not having an inner monolouge. One of my math professors was that way - she told us that she can't recall tunes, so as a child it confused her that her sister could sing songs from memory. She also said that when she lays down to go to sleep, she just chooses to fall asleep and immediately does (no laying awake thinking, etc), and that it's incredibly easy to stay focused because she doesn't get distracted by random thoughts. The thought of not having an inner voice terrifies me for some reason, but she was brilliant so it also kind of sounds like a superpower
My dog roxanne. She's a three and a half year old gator mouth pit. She has a big old head and a Chunky body but she's super fit. She weighs about 75 lb. She has a gray undercoat and tan and black and white colors swirling throughout. She has a long tail, about two and a half feet long that Wags so hard she causes injury to others, and herself along with any item that might get in the way. She has a genuine smile when she gets pet, when we come home, and when we say anything she likes. I've never seen such a genuine smile on any other animal. She has green gray eyes. She has eight large nipples because she's had two litters of puppies. She was a fantastic mom to all of her puppies and therefore loves any and all babies, babies also translates to anything smaller than her.
It's both a blessing and a curse not being able to imagine things. On one hand, I can't 'see' rushing my cat to the vet while she cried in pain the whole car ride. On the other hand, I can't really visualize all the good moments or her face unless I am literally looking at a photo.
You my fellow, have, just like me, aphantasia :)
I'm so sorry for that experience for you...
Well it's clear you love that cat💗
😭😭😭💔💔💔
I always though that “picturing” things in your mind was a figure of speech.
I can't imagine what it's like to think without a mind's eye. I have a constant, vivid movie playing in my head that's either informing me further on the things that I'm experiencing in the moment, or doing it's own thing and distracting me from what's going on at the moment. A bit of a mixed blessing, actually.
@@kangarooninja2594 you can learn to channel your daydreaming to your advantage. I work at university and when I have to read a lot of new papers, I often drift into an imaginary situation where I am doing a TED talk about the stuff that I just learned. It really helps with memorization!
@@MattRose30000 When I read something new I imagine myself explaining it to someone. I then find myself, as the person receiving the explanation, asking questions about things that I hadn't yet considered. Then I reread the material so that I can better answer those questions during the next fantasy conversation.
It takes me a long time to get through reading anything, lol.
Well, I'm capable, for example, to pretend I'm flying over a beach or something... And see everything while doing so.
(I used this when I needed to do RMI, because of my claustrophobia.)
I thought that too, and it was a hell of a shock when I realised some - most - people literally do just that!
I can see images in my head very clearly and brightly in vivid colors but I also have an inner monologue and am speaking out all of the my daily actions in full sentences to myself at all times. I have no idea how anyone can meditate. Clearing my mind is impossible.
Edit: oh am I return to my dreams every night. I enter the same story about %75 percent of the time. I just woke up and my dreams all night were about living in a house full of small animals and fish tanks
I have hyperphantasia so this concept is so fascinating to me. It's just so difficult for me to imaginenot beingable to visualize something in your head! I can remember my dreams so well, even when I wake up, that it just seems like I am going to a different place like a parallel universe, though some may say that that's exactly what we ALL are doing. Sometimes it's difficult for me to differentiate what is a dream memory and what is a living memory. The only way I have learned to tell is that dream memories eventually fade... most of the time 😂
When I conjure something to see from memory, it is a struggle... It's like I get this super brief glimpse of something with a low level of fidelity and then it slips away, I can't hold it for longer than an instant.. but I can conjur it again, but it just slips. Now what is really strange is that I can really conjure up very low fidelity images quite well... like a visio workflow diagram... I can think those up and bang them out quickly as I do it all the time for work. What is SUPER crazy is how vividly I dream. When I am asleep my dreams are frequent, very detailed, and surprise me with humor a lot.
I’m exactly the same, although my dreams tend to be extremely grotesque (not scary, just gory for some reason). I get a brief glimpse but can’t hold on to it. I’ve never been good at remembering faces. I’ve always had a vivid imagination, I just have trouble visualizing what’s in my head. I see things more like words on paper rather than images, and I have since I was a kid. Used to think it was just cuz I read so much.
the permanence of the imagined objects can be trained... precisely as you do... re-conjure the same thing with as much detail, and as similar to the previous conjuration, as possible, and hold on to it, focus. over time, the duration of a single conjuration, and its level of detail, will improve.
When I try to imagine anything its more of a "flash of a silhouette" It last only a fraction of a second and seems to disappear faster when I try to discern any features of the silhouette, Which to me seems strange as I can certainly quickly pull a list of features for what I want to try to imagine; for example dogs having wet noses, floppy ears and a wagging tail but at the same time I can't actually "picture" any of those things. One thing I have always been able to "see" is my own body movements imagined, for example I can imagine my arms moving in a motion to swing a axe to cut wood, I can't however imagine the axe or the wood. My inner monologue though is simply inherent, I can always hear it. I don't think I have gone more than a minute of my conscious life not hearing my own voice pre-thinking, explaining or arguing (With me or just against what someone may have said earlier) It gets so bad that sometimes it starts looping and I have to watch a movie, listen to music or play a game to smother it till I manage to forget how it started.
Holy shit we don’t care this much
Yup, classic Aphantasia, welcome to the club! With regards to an inner monologue, I also have one. Everything is always my voice though, even songs. Some people hear the actual artists singing a song when recollecting a song. For me it’s only my voice singing it, even if I’ve actually never sung it before.
@@cryptolou5741 Wait, THAT'S aphantasia? Oh no...
@@Jackfrommt yes we do! I find it all so bloody interesting
Same visualisation experience here but no monologue.
I have hyperphantasia and it can stop me cold somedays. My client, a teacher talked about dfs kids she saved, I could see and feel it all and fell to tears
I"ve never met anyone else that has this. It can be so self destroying.
Thank you so, so much for bringing this to light. I've struggled with this for many years and still to this day I see only the void in my mind's eye. Actually, I can even see the blood flowing through my eyeballs if I'm concentrated enough! It's a very strange concept to explain and now I have this to show people!
It's extremely useful having an inner monolog/dialog you can use to flesh out an idea by having two voices play off against each other saying why an idea is good vs bad. You listen to both and change the idea to solve all the issues you found in your head.
I have different characters I play sort of, and the characters have personalities that are blends of different people in my life. Like, I have a mean teacher character based on a few teachers and people I met, a wise mentor based on my uncle, an older friend, and one professor, and a friend, based on people whose opinions matter to me.
@@OddBunsen You have strawmen
The problem Is when it becomes a problem and you lose your mind
As somebody who visualizes literally everything from instructions at work to a story being told, all the way to my friends saying, well, horrific SAW movie-esque, maggot infested, necrotic awful type things, I can’t even visualize how some people don’t visualize.
Like what the hell are you seeing when reading a good book? Just words on a page?
I have Aphantasia. I just learned the term through this video. So I used to find it bullshit when people used to paint mental imagery like "Imagine you are in a beach with a tree and....". Then I realized other people can do that and I can't hahah.
To answer your question. I watched first 2 Harry Potter movies as I started reading the books, and the movies helped a lot. Without the movies, it would have been super hard for me hahah. I can recall from memory, but not conjure up an image. Even when I recall from memory, it is more like 5% translucent or something.
For example, if you tell me to imagine my college dorm room, I can recall facts, green wall, where my bed was positioned but not have a mental image.
@@vineets that's fascinating.
"what the hell are you seeing when reading a good book? Just words on a page?"
Yes, that's literally it. I have zero ability to visualize anything but that doesn't mean I also have no imagination or empathy and cannot enjoy a good story. Personally it annoys me when books take a long time describing visual details, I really couldn't care less what kind of colour something is
I have aphantasia and it's basically like I'm reading a book in my mind when i try to imagine something. But no matter how detailed I can describe it I can't actually see an image. Despite that I have vivid dreams with images. I Even spend a lot of my time while I'm awake imagining stories and stuff like that. I can have such a detailed "picture" description in my mind but I'll never actually visualize it while I'm awake.
I think I might have hyperphantasia, because I frequently re-enter dreams, even to such extend, that I keep coming back to the same dream, like if it was a tv series, and it’s not just one dream like that, and it also varies, sometimes it’s just an environment that’s “recycled” sometimes it’s nearly identical dream as the last time (but never completely identical).
I also have frequent dreams where I’m in a classroom with everyone I ever knew at that same time, like, the classroom appears normal, both in size and appearance, usually identical to one of the schools I went to, and it’s not like every person was seated at the tiny classroom simultaneously, it’s more like, that I look around, see a set of people, after a while it’s different set of people, and I even get to see them coming in and out, switching places as needed. And it can be people I haven’t seen since I went to school, with them over a decade, and odd thing is, that they age with me, so even someone I saw last time as 8 year old, is now here in my age, looking like how I imagine them to look now.
If something similiar happens to anyone, feel free to write it down.
Anyone else have a complete "ah HAH!" moment watching this video? Definitely on the hyper side of things, and explains sooo much. Awesome video.
I find it a bit terrifying that there are people who don’t have a minds eye. The thought of losing mine gives me anxiety.
@@danwebber9494 Oddly enough I find the thought of having an hyperactive mind's eye scary. Although the the thought of losing my mind's ear terrifies me. I'd also like to keep my mind's tastebuds too.
@@elomwindnwater7090 thank the heavens you don’t have friends like mine who intentionally describe the most decaying, necrotic, maggot-infested horrific shit just because they know I see it in hyper vivid detail.
It’s hard to explain but whatever I see in my head is...somehow more realistic than what my 20/20 perfectly healthy eyes see. Sort of like pastel art vs a photograph.
@@MattNeufyThanks for making me even more paranoid, ah . . . But seriously I find that amazing. I can imagine song and music combinations I've never heard before easily, but for imagery most times it's impossible. And even for visions I remember, except in special cases it's the usually just greyish.
Imagining visuals from textual descriptions, well I never even knew people did that much more than very vaguely. I can't decide WHAT to imagine, yet alone try to imagine.
But your friends though gosh @.@
Only with audio its on the hyper end of things, I can remember music as if it where right at my ears.
I saw my dog - golden retriever. He’s no longer with us, he was just standing and smiling in his own specific way
Almost exactly the same. Only my dog was a flatcoated retriever (black version).
Me too! Miss my golden girl.
I never even had a dog but I saw a golden retriever standing in someone's kitchen being adorable
Same here, dark golden coat, white spot on top his head and a larger patch on the chest. Damn i miss him...
I imagined my dog that recently died it was black with a white strip in its neck and it was laying down
I was an elementary school teacher for 35 years and learned this about my students some years ago. I often asked my students to illustrate something we had read in a novel and most kids could do it. But not all. The kids who couldn’t do it were the students who had the most difficulty with reading and, more specifically, had trouble with recall of details and comprehension of what we had read. They saw nothing in their minds eye of what had happened in the story. That led me to question my students about what they “saw” while I read to them. Some students saw nothing. Blew my mind….as I see a “movie” in my head when I read or listen to audio.
When I study and learn things I actually memeorize in pictures and recall things by their place on the page in my notes so I think that’s actually hyperphantasia
I only learned about this phenomenon a few years ago and I find it fascinating that some people don't have a mind's eye or an internal voice. I can't even comprehend how thought would work without either of those.
How weird mind is.
I wonder how an alien or AI mind would work.🤯
Yeah or someone like Hellen Keller, how did she process things in her mind, how can you visualize things without ever seeing anything, and how can you have an inner monologue if you have never heard words. Like say I was psychic, could I even read her mind, or would the way her mind works be untranslatable to me.
Same! When I first learned about this, it was both fascinating and dumbfounding! I am hyperfantasiac and have an inner monologue....so it is hard to comprehend how one thinks/processes information without either.
yea, same as: how does a deaf person think their thoughts? In what language, as they never heard a word. Its already weird just thinking about it :D
@@morteza1024 a
This is amazing. I can't imagine anything. I was always a great artist, although I could only recreate perfectly what I can see. I could never draw things without a reference because I couldn't imagine what anything looked like. So in my mind I was never an artist and couldn't be. I was just able to photocopy brilliantly.
Same. I would tell ppl I was a xerox artist never felt like a “true” artist like my son or others who I see can draw from their mind. Blows mine lol.
I don't know if that's why you can't draw creatively. It's possible to make the canvas BECOME your mind's eye. Imagining things is different than visualizing them. I don't draw, but I do create things with wood. I can't visualize for shit. But I still know what I want to see and how to get there.
Vermeer used a light box and traced the image it created on his canvas. Never be down on yourself for your art. It's yours no matter the form. The ability to express yourself is prescious.
Nah, you're just not trying appropriately. You can't go in with a complete image in your head so you use the technical skills from art to mess around on the canvas and spark ideas.
Chuck Close was a famous photo-realist portraitist. It took him years to realize the role central role face blindness (inability to recognize faces) played in his art. Don't dismiss your own abilities based on social expectations about art & creativity. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Close
I have full sensory aphantasia. Whilst I can remember if I like/dislike certain things like smells, sounds etc., I can't re-experience them at will. I don't have a mind's eye, I don't have an internal monologue as such either and I'm pretty faceblind. My mind was absolutely blown when I found out that people ACTUALLY see pictures in their heads, that sounds like it would be so mentally overwhelming. I always thought the term 'visualise something in your minds eye' was purely metaphorical.
I don't have exactly the same as you but I recently found out I have no visual minds eye and your last sentence struck a cord with me because I too thought things like 'counting sheep' and 'imagine you are on a beach' was metophorical and just meant to relax!
Mind blown when I realised that I have no visual memory whatsoever and that some people can recall things in the minutest of detail. I was very jealous of those people for a time but Athantiasia has its ups sides too
I have hyperphantasia, there are times where I have had entire hypothetical scenarios in my head play out. I also am able to easily visualize earth processes which helps me as a geologist. I recall in elementary school that when I day-dreamed hard enough, I made entire movies in my head to entertain myself.
I do that if I'm having a hard time falling asleep.
Same! I daydream too much lol. I wouldn't trade it for anything though. I kind of describe it like how in scrubs they would picture what they'd actually like to do or say but then it snaps back to reality when they do something else.
@@sapphiresupernova Great analogy!
Is that what it’s called? I definitely have this. I’ll create entire scenarios in my head over some tiny thing that happened. One time that comes to mind is when I was given $20 too much change at a fast food place. That night, I envisioned this whole scenario where the kid who did it was on his last strike and got fired. He had a girlfriend and a newborn and she took the kid with her because she was tired of this guy being a “loser” and fucking up. He got so depressed that he ended up killing himself. So the next day, I went back and returned it and told the manager I didn’t want the kid to get in trouble. He said they’d correct his record as if it hadn’t happened.
@@polythewicked Sounds like you have a dose of anxiety in there as well lol, but yes.
Uhmmm I just realized that I have exactly that, I couldnt think of anything even tho I tried my hardest. Now it makes sense that I could never remember faces of anyone, wich made it hard for me to describe people. Geniuenly thankful that you brought this to me
Same here. I always struggled with spelling to as I have never been able to picture words, no matter how many times I repeated them for spelling tests at school.
I literally dream entire feature film stories with sensible narratives that sometimes span multiple nights.
That's epic!
Wow me to, I used to wake up sometimes thinking wow what a great movie and search for it online only to realize it only exists in my head
@@elomwindnwater7090 it can be a bit of a curse, it takes a lot of effort to wake up sometimes.
@@brianmiller915 Gosh that's been happening to me recently, including believing for a few minutes after waking that's a memory of a legit anime and then suddenly realising it was a dream. One time I woke up and said in my head 'now I can't finish the anime I was watching' or something to that effect.
These days I consider my dream shows and novels as basically legit. The trailer for JiCession was really interesting.
In fact my ability in my dreams to create songs and song lyrics-even raps, for goodness sake!-are so superior to that of my walking hours that the vast majority of the time I can't imagine how my brain could possibly come up with something that good, when it comes to music.
My dream shows are not to bad either. JiCession is an Anime where the main character's study and relation with ancient texts could bring about the end of the world-or save it.
@@supermaster2012 Haha, exactly!
Epic is a small pun here, given it's relation to "episode' and 'epilougue', the 'ep' part. Hehe
I mean, spanning multiple nights, that's really cool. When are these movies going to be in cinemas? They sound Epic.
I really enjoy your videos, Joe. You're hilarious and informative, best of both worlds
I pre-play everything thru my mind's eye. Arguements, appointments, new events, movies, books, conversations, videos that I'm going to shoot. As a child and a young adult I thought it was the reason why i could easily write stories and even novels. I can literally see a story play thru in my mind just like watching a moving and I can write it down as it plays in slow motion. It is also a major problem for me because the outcome of all this crap in my head sometimes stops me from going somewhere or trying something new.
Forgot to mention the dog, a raggedy, long red haired spaniel type of dog. i never had a dog even remotely like this but there might be one in a children's story. Can't name it at the moment. LOL
As a kid I had a problem with losing my mind in a parallel universe. It took very little to loose myself in my thoughts as image after image of what my teachers would describe. Like every subject would start with a description of something and I would lose myself in a endless tangent. Which by the way my inner monologue was always a wise woman’s voice.
“I basically have a Monthy Python sketch going on in my head” what a mood
I had a TBI back in ‘017 and as Ive healed from it Ive gone back and forth from one extreme of this spectrum to another so this video was very helpful to me in better being able to express to others what Im experiencing. This will come in handy as Im getting a new neurologist
Well the way I see your living rooms is perfect and has satisfied the creative interior designer in me!! Thank you ♥️🛋🪴
I immediately saw my dog, Revan with a goofy grin on his face. He's a brindle pit bull/rottweiler mix; an absolutey beautiful puppers.
I have 2 and that didn't happen. Without giving me more specific's different dogs just keep flowing. Which one do I pick to stop and describe? IDK
my god i always feel like im reliving my embarrassing moments whenever i get vivid flashbacks of it. i cringe so hard i could punch a wall
Same here.
I often wish I could go back in time and simply behave differently. But even talking to the people involved and learning that they don't remember the incident at all doesn't help, so I don't know if time travel would..
Hi Jak, I wanted to say something here because i too had a habit of reliving super cringe moments of my life over and over. I finally managed to stop it though and it didn't just happen, I made it stop. I conjured one of the memorys in my mind willingly and really thought hard about it visualizing as much as I could and I told myself that I was that person but I am no longer. I recognize the action I am remembering is something that I dont want to repeat and I now am a person who would not do that thing. In essence I am no longer that person. Im better now and instead of wishing I could rewind time like in a video game or film, I can see that as I have moved forward I have learned and progressed. I forgave my past self and looked forward instead of back. I went through all of my cringey memories and got rid of the lot. I hope this helps in some way at all. It might sound a bit bullshit but past me really needed and hug from present me.
@@davidsowerby6972 yea.. i've been trying hard converting these god awful memories to good ones i could just laugh about. i have been successful in doing that, but those memories are really old. it's the new memories that are getting to me (2019-present). and i will likely still be creating new embarrassing moments as i am still a teen. one of the things i try to do (and is very effective) whenever i remember these memories is that i try to think of someone else's embarrassing moments, usually i could never think of any, so why do i need to worry so much about mine. but if i do think of one, i slap myself.. then get kinda over it..
my other coping mechanism is to just say random shit to someone beside me (if i know them) then just bother them until i was over it. happens a lot of times. my mom gets sick of me saying 'how are you' to her over and over again hah..
thank you, david, for your advice. i will hopefully cope better as i get older
Hopefully this can help you, and others, pertaining to cringe memories, but look into something called "Protagonist Syndrome". Everyone is the main character in their own story and hardly ever have a sonder or consider that they or their actions might mean less to others than they mean to themselves.
Essentially, when someone else does something embarrassing in front of you, you probably forget it ever happened within minutes or you might joke about it later, meanwhile they're reliving and remembering it constantly and are super embarrassed you saw it, despite the fact you don't even think about their life and actions that don't effect you, let alone something stupid they did. The same applies to you. While you fixate or remember, everyone else forgets it happened or doesn't give it as much importance as you do. Put yourself in their shoes and try to remember some of the dumb things they did, you most likely can't or it doesn't mean anything, they function similar to you.
I really hope this helps. It's how I personally learned to kill the cringe. Plan B is to develop the "ah well, f*ck it" mentality about things. Maybe internalize both and combine them.
I so feel that omg
I was always a fairly decent drawer and I've never been able to understand why not everyone can draw. I don't mean photorealism or anywhere close (in fact I can't do that with most things) but just the ability to conjure a basic idea of what an object looks like in the mind, and then translating that to lines on paper, with at least somewhat realistic proportions, etc., so that someone else could look at it and say "that's a _____."
The description for the question at the begging, i see a dark colored german shepherd on a green grassy field, panting, looking generally happy!
about 4 years ago i suffered a quite severe TBI, and for a good while thereafter i had a very hard time reading, following conversations, understanding time and places, and the worst of all was that i lost the ability to create pictures and "videos" in my head, but thankfully everything came back, besides my anxiety, i knocked that out for good. 😅
Wow, this makes some sense out of things in my life. My wife is incredible at remembering people's names and faces. It's something that makes her extremely good at her job. I have a hard time with names and faces, but not numbers or dates.
I have a hard time with all of the above
numbers and names arent that different though. I bet you know every name you ever learned, you just dont know who it belongs to haha
@@acidsteve9837 yeah, they're similar at face value. I guess I should've explained a little better. Names are just sounds or words. Numbers invoke something like a feeling. It's really hard to explain. Take 45, for instance. Seeing it is satisfying, like a watered down version of the feeling you get from watching satisfying gifs or vids. Something about the stability feeling of 5 and the somewhat destructive beauty sense I get from 9. It's really weird, and if it's written out (five), I have to say it, or I get nothing. It's not something that's extremely strong, and when I get to higher numbers, my mood influences what multiples I go with at that instance, so one number can provoke different feelings. But I'm no number wizard. After 4 digits, there's not much of an effect unless the number pattern is appealing to me, and if there's a decimal, it just looks ugly and does nothing for me as a whole. At the same time, if I think of the decimal as a fraction (like .125 is 1/8) it makes a big difference. I love fractions. I hope this makes a little bit of sense. It's difficult to explain something so abstract.
@@ColeyDuncan Yeah i think i kinda get what you mean, It's so weird how different parts of the brain communicate to each other and make your reality drastically different. And incredibly hard to describe to another human being who doesn't have the same experience. I think you basically connect beauty and aesthetics with certain numbers, at the most basic of explanations. And beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. So i totally understand that numbers could evoke such feelings. Yet what that actually might feel like i will never know. Which is sad, and beautiful at the same time. We all live in different realities.
I have very hard time to remember faces. BUT - I can vividly imagine every story of any book I read so perfectly that i barely see the letters in the book. But still, the characters never have specific face.
“I basically have a Monty Python sketch in my head”… I feel where you are coming from there! Very cool 😎
When I'm working on some problem, I have to use a monolog, and use up a portion of my willpower just keeping it internal. Related, when people are talking or describing something, I _need_ some kind of visual. So when co-workers don't write or draw anything on a whiteboard, I'm stuck trying to build up a crude picture in my head or on paper. :)
I totally related to this statement as well!
I had the vviq test this year and I never knew seeing images in your minds eye was something people actually did. I thought of that as an expression people just say. I see only a black abyss when I close my eyes and try to visualize images, I do know what I'd like to see but there is no image at all. I've always been artistic and occasionally dream vividly but I didn't know my brain was working differently until I was 32 years old. Doing guided meditation is sometimes frustrating and difficult.
Do these personality preferences that go along with aphantasia match up with you? ruclips.net/video/QFO7GORmKfI/видео.html
Oh I am definitely an inner-dialogue person! I have unvoiced, though often-whispered, conversations all day long and at night which does interfere with sleep. I need to really try to empty my mind to drop off to sleep.
I do see things in my mind’s eye as well. Over the years, I found I have lost the ability to remember faces very well, especially from my childhood, although I could describe individual features. Childhood events are often gone from my memory too, or altered from the way someone else remembers them. Which is worrisome.
Until a couple years ago I thought "mind's eye" was just an expression, not a literal thing.
why would it be just an expression?
Same here...
@@Bizarro69 because it makes no sense to you if you have aphantasia and are not aware of it, i.e. think everyone thinks/imagines like you and nobody can visualize thoughts.
@@nemanjamarsenic1626 exactly! I always thought mind's eye was an expression for imagination, not literal visual imagery. That's why I was really confused when I first heard about aphantasia online, i was like "well I have imagination so this can't be me".
@@kamil.g.m I actually didn't know about that expression before I found pit I have aphantasia, probably because English is not my native language and I don't think we have that expression in my native language. But whenever I watched a movie where someone is robbed and they go to a sketch artist in the police station and describe the robber I though it was some TV bulshit. Similar for thise scenes when they go to a psychologist and they ask them to "go to the(or imagine they're in) their sage place" and people close they eyes and stsrt describing what they see.
"Breakfast table?" Ooooo, look who's fancy. I just eat toast and yogurt over the kitchen sink like a normal depressed 43-year-old bachelor, none of that hoity-toity table-sitting. Pffsh!
Bruh... you just fixed my fucked up night. Ty
Well look at moneybags over here, having a sink and stuff!
@@hamstsorkxxor 🤣👌🍻
C'mon man, that was straight to the heart.
Sink! Sink? Well it was more a hole scratched out in the ground filled with used coffee grounds and cold piss water, but it was sink to us! And we counted our selves lucky!
I can usually not only replay memories from years back very vividly in present time, but I can also visualize completely new environments, people, relationships, tragedies, fantasies, etc, whenever and wherever, which is pretty cool, but you have to be carful because If you get carried away imagining and playing in so many fantasies that it starts to disconnect you with reality. For example, playing out how someone you know would react to something you do or say to them because you have a good idea of how they behave, usually for me Im never close to accurately playing out the scenario in my head to how it actually plays out in real life. There are lots of imagined scenarios that do play out in reality how I imagine them, but usually the more human emotions involved the scenario, the further from reality, meaning It is extremely difficult to predict how other peoples emotions will impact their actions. However, it is usually very easy for us to know how our emotions will impact our own actions, meaning everyone experiences emotions very differently than others. On a side note, id say I have hyperphantasia because I've even passed out in class when watching open heart surgery because my mind imagined the open heart surgery being done on me while still being conscious, which caused the weirdest experience I've ever felt before slowly passing out.
I was literally wondering about this yesterday. It was more along the lines of why some people don't have voice in their head. It's cool and weird to think that people don't have these things going on in their brains when I've thought my whole life that everyone did. Or at least didn't think they didn't, if that makes sense. Thanks for enlightening us!
As someone with moderate mind-blindness, it's great this is getting more attention. I remember trying to explain to my friends my experiences with this and they just stared at me in utter confusion: "Picture a strawberry what do you see? I don't 'see' anything, maybe I'm just weird." But I *can* audiate (hear music in my mind) extremely well, so trade-offs I guess.
Your description of it not being a lack of imagination, but simply a different way of processing it, and the description of the person remembering Beyonce pretty much tracks to me exactly as well. I too describe things in terms of facts/features that I get similar to the way things would be described in a novel, rather than imaging a "picture". And similarly when reading I can "visualize" imaging simply by the words without my mind constructing a "picture" of it per se.
This is worded perfectly for how i am, also i can play music in my head, whole songs with instruments, I rarely walk around with music playing unless its new music for me, cause i can jst listen to any song i alredy know, takes a good portion of my concentration though lol.
I have difficulty pulling up an image, mostly impressions, emotional memories, clear touch sensations. Visual and auditory sensations are rare for me to imagine clearly. But I dream in movie like clarity.
This explains so much. I’ve always been confused as to how my husband doesn’t dream or think in pictures, because I dream SO vividly I can tell you what shoes people in my dreams were wearing.
I literally spent several minutes last night trying to figure out if a visual I had in my head came from a memory or a dream (pretty sure it was a dream I had years and years ago). And the book versus tv/movie thing? YEAH. I don’t usually see faces when I’m reading, but everything else is SUPER vivid.
That said, I’m not a visual processor, I’m an auditory one. So I constantly have like an inner monologue of visuals AND auditory dialogues in my head. Yaaayyy, ADHD. 🙃
This has always been so strange to me. I have VERY vivid pictures in my head when im thinking. I can imagine very specific things, characters, locations, and all the details that apply to them and can even make them move in my head like a video. It even extends to audio, i can playback entire songs in my head and its almost like listening to the real thing. I can imagine a tiny person on my desk and damn near see him walking around in real time. I thought everyone could do that.