Explains 3 types of thinking that people use in their day-to-day: Linear verbal, schematic conceptual, and photo realistic.

It’s all a spectrum so you likely use all 3 to an extent.

Most people think linearly and sort of describe things in their mind that they’re trying to imagine. It’s a picture but not really.

Engineering types most commonly are strong in conceptual thinking. You can imagine complex systems and how they connect but it’s hard to describe and linearize this into words. You have to translate. Again it’s sort of an imagined picture but not really.

Then there is photo realistic where you see the thing in your mind. Almost as if you were seeing it for realzies with your eyes. Common with visual artists and some types of autism. Linearizing into words is almost impossible.

The book talks about the extreme opposite of aphantasia but it builds a good way of understanding these different qualia imo

The Wake Back to Bed (WBTB) method has been especially frustrating, because I'll see my usual nothing when my eyes are closed, but then for the very briefest instant I see a dream image that immediately disappears the moment I notice it.

I wonder whether whatever makes my brain aphantasic is also responsible for switching off those almost-lucid images.

They have a theory that artists who have to struggle more during the training and developing of being able to express on medium develop into better artists.

[0] https://youtu.be/2wiqPPICQP0?si=CK_4M8dghGl-oaX_&t=2104

So whenever I chat with someone with is Aphantasiac being able to compare and contrast has been a treasure trove. Hobbies, careers, romance/relationships, what we like to read/watch, what we are good and bad at. Having our two extremes allow us to do rapid research see what is opposite and what isn't.

And then in the same way I will describe smells by how they look like they will describe stuff to me that I struggle grasping without visualizing it and that is a joy.

I think I have good visualisation ability (based on spacial reasoning tests and ability to visualise complex software systems) but it's not like seeing something in real life; there is much less detail. Though on the plus side, I can manipulate the scene flexibly; I can zoom in, rotate, hover but a lot of detail is missing.

It's not blurry, it's more like what happens when you watch an AI-generated video of a four-legged animal walking and you didn't immediately notice that there was a fifth leg which popped out briefly before disappearing again... Or a bunch of mice are running around and one of the mice splits into two. It has a similar kind of quality where it's not constrained by the laws of physics and I only really see what I choose to focus on. What I'm not focusing on essentially disappears. I can zoom into some detail and it becomes clearer/more realistic but I sacrifice the big picture view. It's not uniformly vidid like something I see in real life.

Though I think the emotions I experience are the similar to reality (if it's a memory) so it feels like re-living the moment. The emotional and conceptual aspect is higher fidelity to me than the visual.

Overall though, my thinking style is very emotions-driven. I think I have a kind of synesthesia where every logical and visual concept in my mind is associated with a complex feeling.

But ironically, I don't usually act emotionally in my day to day. People I know would say I'm very rational but it's like my emotions themselves are rational if that makes sense. I feel complex emotions though not very strong ones.

This was until I tried some magic mushrooms (psilocybin as main ingredient) and I was shocked that with my eyes closed I was able to actually see things, mental imagery, objects, etc. After the effects wore off, the blackness has returned I couldn't see anything anymore. To me this is proof that aphantasia is real as I was able to compare it to a different state of mind where visualization is possible.

It's quite unfortunate that research on psychedelics is limited due to the insane war on drugs.

“we experience these as an awareness of a set of spatial facts.”

really resonates with me, as to how it feels inside my brain. I'm also really good at shape rotation and spatial reasoning despite not being able to literally picture the environment.

my pet theory is that there are just different places in the stream of consciousness your attention can rest and mine cannot be pointed at the 'mental machinery' that actually produces the images but instead rests at a higher level of abstraction after the visual signal is integrated into the representation of the 3d world that gets used for tasks like shape rotation.

I also don't have an internal monologue most of the time, but I can consciously will myself to do it, and then it is hard to get out of that mode, analogous to the 'you are now breathing manually' meme. I can do it but it feels annoying and slows down my reading and thinking.

Now that we have agentic systems the analogy of the internal monologue being a subagent is probably a good way to describe it, yeah i could read the thinking trace word for word, but most of the time it feels like existing at the level where the data that gets extracted from the stream of thought gets integrated.

Honesty it's so interesting to me how many different ways of experiencing the use of your brain we exist. Sort of reminds me of how there is no single method of crawling a baby learns, there are a bunch of different ways to do it and children just discover one and go with it. Walking seems to be different in that there basically is one good way to do it. I guess there are a lot of degrees of freedom in how the process of being can run on the brain.

Doing art teaches you that you only have a general sense of what a lot of objects look like. People need reference for almost everything they haven't drawn before, and can struggle to understand the proportions of things they're directly looking at.

Does everyone have aphantasia? Is it like ADHD where finding a person that doesn’t claim to have it is pretty much impossible?

Imagine a cube that has a red top and bottom and front face, and all other faces are blue. How many edges are red on one side and blue on the other?

Now, in solving that, if you are a visual thinker, you may have actually mentally "turned" the cube to "look" at the other side. I can exactly pinpoint doing that in my mind, to count the edges I couldn't "see" from the front.

you can roughly draw the object from memory

you can name its main parts

you can name its main colors

you can describe its spatial orientation

The image shouldn't be as clear as a hallucination, and it should be a memory of a specific object, not a generic one. Meeting these criteria is already enough to link another image to it, for example by piercing it with another object, though there's also the question of imagining it at a large enough size.

Aphants, do these hold for you? Take Doge, the popular meme dog: not a generic Shiba Inu, but that exact picture. Could you sketch it, name its parts and colors, and say which way it's facing? And could you imagine, say, a pencil piercing it?

1. How’s your audio-lization? Can you hear music (accurately) in your head? Can you pick out instruments, pause, rewind, etc?

2. Can you visualize pure motion? Maybe you can’t visualize a woman clearly, but can you visualize the motion of a woman doing, e.g., jumping jacks? (For me, I can see complex motion clearly without seeing any underlying shape, if that makes sense)

3. Can you visualize just colors? I discovered that I can conjure up colors without any associated shape. Takes a bit of patience but the color eventually arrives. Quite a thrill for an aphantasic!

If people have an "inner taste" or "inner hearing", why bother eating a sweet or playing music?

Asked what sits beside the television, they answer without hesitation, but “we experience these as an awareness of a set of spatial facts.”

This helps me understand what little I do seem to have.

Maybe the most vivid thing that I can imagine is the world map, but... I wouldn't call it visual. But I can recall that Europe is east of US, and Italy looks like a boot.

Perhaps it is just spatial facts.

Practically, it means I'm rubbish at remembering people. I've developed some techniques that help, but if someone changes their look significantly, it's very hard for me to identify that it's the same person.

I'm still learning how this has impacted by life, and strategies for working with it. As a simple example, my wife's family was really into cars, so when I got to know them I learned all about cars. When I met my wife, I couldn't identify a single vehicle on the road, except maybe a Hummer, but after 2 years, I could quickly pick out the make and model of 95% of traffic.

Looking back, I can see this is because rather than remember what different cars looked like, I created a taxonomy of ALL cars in my head, and became able to sort any vehicle I saw to fit there somewhere. So when I identified something, I wasn't matching it against previously seen things, but rather eliminating all the things it couldn't be to arrive at the remaining possibility.

She has full aphantasia and she thought it’s the default

Why This Matters

Move on.

In that theory, people without an inner monologue and without imagination are soulless, real life NPC.

To me, this inner world is an essential property of being human.

And yet, I can somehow imagine the look of a specific person or thing. I can't really see it as a vivid image, like actually seeing something in real life, but I have a sense of imagining it as visually distinct from any other image.

My audio imagination is top-notch though, I can replay songs and sounds in my head perfectly and vividly.

This distinction consists of sharing visions and describing your interior life that is ultimately intangible, beyond words, and unknowable to other human beings. There are no diagnostic criteria or indications, but drugs sometimes play a part. This is something that will garner a TikTok “community” of self-identified spectral faithful adherents.

There is no quantifying this; there is no standardized measurement except for ectoplasmic ghost sensors. How can empirical comparisons or baselines be established without a vocabulary or metrics?

Commenters in this thread are making claims about these but even further, judging and speculating on the interior lives and abilities of other people, hypothetical people, people you haven’t met. These seem problematic.