Before reading this post I had no idea I had aphantasia and thought everyone else was the same as me, unable to see anything when they closed their eyes. This helped me understand myself and my relationships so much better than ever before. Thanks Blake!
I participated in the Prosopagnosia study at Imperial a few years ago. I also don't hear any internal monologue; When I think, I think in words, and it is very similar to reading.
I think I can imagine sounds in my head, but it is a little like singing, or humming a tune without making noise. I believe I have the cadence and rhythm of sounds, but it's not really easy to get words that way.
I can also recognise some specific images I have seen previously, but I definitely do not see them and cannot conjure up any imagery of any kind.
You might be amused to know that until I joined that study I had no idea that you were thinking any differently than I was, and since learning you-all are freaks, I have wondered if the reason you guys get distracted so easily is that you're watching a movie out of the corner of your eye, or maybe the reason you think code is unreadable is that you need to sound out your program in order to read it.
>I participated in the Prosopagnosia study at Imperial a few years ago. I also don't hear any internal monologue; When I think, I think in words, and it is very similar to reading.
Isn't this exactly what an internal monologue is? Lack of internal monologue would be someone who thinks only abstractly or visually, without any words.
>I think I can imagine sounds in my head, but it is a little like singing, or humming a tune without making noise. I believe I have the cadence and rhythm of sounds, but it's not really easy to get words that way.
Yes, isn't this what pretty much everyone experiences, unless they have one of these listed disorders? If you can think in words, watch a TV show and later picture what the characters look like, and listen to a song and have it get "stuck in your head", then I think you have an internal monologue and don't have aphantasia.
> Isn't this exactly what an internal monologue is? Lack of internal monologue would be someone who thinks only abstractly or visually, without any words.
I don't know. It's like reading though. I definitely don't hear a voice (mine or anyone else's).
> If you can think in words, watch a TV show and later picture what the characters look like, and listen to a song and have it get "stuck in your head", then I think you have an internal monologue and don't have aphantasia.
Nope. I can't picture what the characters look like. I can't get a song stuck in my head either.
>I think I can imagine sounds in my head, but it is a little like singing, or humming a tune without making noise.
This seems like how I and I assume most people experience the phenomenon of recalling or thinking about sound. It's just more or less vivid and detailed for different people.
Do you listen to music often? If so, you've never listened to a song and later had some sort of experience where something about that song stayed remnant in your mind?
If you try to imagine the loud alarm of an alarm clock, do you feel like you're experiencing something? By "experiencing", I mean you aren't just like "I can't even say any part of what I'm doing is imagining the sound of an alarm", but are in some way perceiving some kind of representation of some recollection of hearing an alarm clock's alarm.
Also, what happens in your mind when you hum something? To me, humming is the process of transforming that rough, vague, general "phantasic" representation of pitch/amplitude/time into rough, vague, general vocal cord movements. I could be very wrong, but I suspect that if someone is capable of humming anything with even the tiniest minuscule of correlation with the original song, then they don't have aphantasia (with respect to sound).
My speculative, uninformed hypothesis is that actual aphantasia is very rare and that sometimes there's misunderstanding of what it means, combined with the fact that some people have less vivid imaginations and mental representations than others.
Many people may have "weak phantasia", e.g. they may not internally imagine a 1-to-1 visual representation of what they saw on a walk on the previous day, or may not recreate every texture and pitch in a song they heard, but they can imagine some rough approximation of them. I think almost no one can construct these perfect mental recreations; maybe von Neumann and a tiny number of others.
For most people, I'd guess it's probably like 0.1 - 10%. But I think 0% is rare. And during dreaming, I imagine for most people it may increase to like 10 - 40%.
The weaker it is, I think the less one may feel attached to a term like "seeing" or "hearing". But I think no one is ever actually "seeing" or "hearing". It's just a mental representation which no term can fully describe. Kind of like how you can't exactly put a scientific, objective perceptual term to the experience of feeling love. It's just an internal, subjective experience within your mind. Something a little bit more like "reading" rather than "hearing", as you say.
And for internal monologue: if I ask you to "think" the phrase "I am going to go to the store", were you able to "think it"? If so, then I think you probably have internal monologue, or at least the capacity for internal monologue. It may not manifest very often, and you may "experience" it less "potently" than some other people, but I think you have it.
The suspected misunderstanding with internal monologue is that I think some people "spend more time with" their internal monologue than others. Like, a catastrophizer might regularly think the words "oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck what do I do", while for someone else their mind may be fairly "blank" most of the time, especially if they're distracted with something.
For people who experience it more frequently, some percentage of it may manifest and "bleed over" into spoken utterances, like the catastrophizer may sometimes mumble "oh fuck", perhaps without even realizing it. In my opinion, humming is often this same sort of "bleeding over" of the internal into the external, but with music instead of monologue.
Based on what you've said so far, I think you potentially might have visual aphantasia, but I think you likely don't have aural aphantasia or lack of internal monologue. And I think it's possible you also may not have visual aphantasia; there still might be a disconnect between what people mean by "visual imagination" and what you think they mean.
> If so, you've never listened to a song and later had some sort of experience where something about that song stayed remnant in your mind?
With listening? Never. I can remember the lyrics of songs, and I can remember (sometimes) the progression of notes, but no: nothing I would refer to as an “experience”. They might as well be written down.
> you try to imagine the loud alarm of an alarm clock, do you feel like you're experiencing something?
No. I know what an alarm clock is and I know they can go “ding ding ding ding ding” - but these things are just the same words I give to you. Again: I certainly can’t experience an alarm clock in my head (or experience being in the same room as an alarm clock or anything like that)
> Also, what happens in your mind when you hum something?
If I hum and then stop, I have a sensation of the vibration and of the way my breathing changes. I can then recall (in some way) those vibrations and then reintroduce heavier breath so we hear sound again.
Is this not like how it is for you? Do you remember “the sound” of your own hum and try to reproduce it?
> Based on what you've said so far, I think you potentially might have visual aphantasia
If you are a researcher working in this space, you can send me an email from an edu address and I’ll connect you with the people who ran tests on me in London.
If not, could you explain why you’re giving your opinion?
>If not, could you explain why you’re giving your opinion?
I'm not a researcher or a scientist of any kind. I know very little about aphantasia, and don't experience it myself or know anyone who does (besides one podcaster I listen to). I simply suspect that some percentage of people who report aphantasia may not actually have it, based on dozens of peoples' self-reports that I've read before. Subjective experiences are complicated. I could certainly be completely wrong both in general and in this case, though.
I based most of my reply on the fact that you said:
>I think I can imagine sounds in my head, but it is a little like singing, or humming a tune without making noise.
To me, this is the experience of aural "phantasia". This is what happens when I imagine sounds in my head. That's why I read your post with a sense of dissonance. It made me want to try to understand how you can have this kind of "humming a tune without making noise" sound in your head yet also have aural aphantasia.
Are you able to hum a song you've heard before? If so, I think that could potentially require a kind of ability to represent the song in your mind, though I could be wrong about that.
Are you able to think about a note with some pitch frequency and then about a note with a higher pitch frequency right afterwards? If not, what is the experience of humming like for you? If so, then what's happening when you're thinking about these pitches?
The fact that you've never had anything like a song getting stuck in your head (e.g. hearing a song you like and humming or thinking about it a later time) would make me think there likely is something atypical about your experience, at the least, though.
Additionally, you said:
>I don't know. It's like reading though. I definitely don't hear a voice (mine or anyone else's).
This is also my own perception of what internal monologue is like for me. Although this is potentially a separate phenomenon from aphantasia, to me it seemed like you were saying you didn't have an internal monologue when I thought maybe you did, which, if true, made me think there was possibly an increased chance you don't have aphantasia if you think you do.
Obviously you know your own experience better than anyone else does or could, but there's a lot of ambiguity and ineffability around the meanings of all of these terms; a little bit like (though not as extreme as) trying to describe the experience of perceiving a particular color.
I'm also doing all this in part so I can better understand the phenomenon and educate myself.
I initially was considering adding the "I think you likely don't have aural aphantasia" part but decided to leave it out, since it's extremely presumptive, but the imagining sounds/humming thing and the capability of humming something you've heard before (if I understand correctly) seemed so contradictory with what I personally understand aphantasia to be that I later went back and edited it in. If not for that part I probably wouldn't have replied and would've just silently acknowledged your aphantasia.
> Are you able to hum a song you've heard before? If so, I think that could potentially require a kind of ability to represent the song in your mind
If I pay attention I can tell that a sound is higher or lower than another. I can also count. It often requires a lot of concentration (and many repeats) to hum a song I have heard.
> Are you able to think about a note with some pitch frequency and then about a note with a higher pitch frequency right afterwards?
Yes. I can also tell the names of tones (as in keys on a piano) in some cases, but it requires a lot of focus to do this quickly, and the tones usually have to be pretty simplistic or extremely rhythmic.
> If so, then what's happening when you're thinking about these pitches?
What do you mean? If you have ever played SIMON you have to memorise a sequence of red blue yellow and green lights. The repetition starts slowly and gets faster. Then it can become so fast it is overwhelming. Do you memorize the colours or the names of the colours? If you haven’t played it maybe you could look at a YouTube video and get the idea.
> it seemed like you were saying you didn't have an internal monologue
I said I can’t hear one.
> I simply suspect that some percentage of people who report aphantasia may not actually have it, based on dozens of peoples' self-reports that I've read before.
That’s not what I asked. I asked you why you gave your opinion, not why you have an opinion.
I have noticed people do this quite often, and I do not really know why. I wonder if you can sufficiently self-reflect to explain your thinking to me.
I think their argument may stem from the fact that they can’t remove themselves from their own frame of reference enough to understand yours. In their head, to have this abnormal diagnosis, you must either be exactly like their perspective of someone with aphantasia, or be someone who just doesn’t understand that your experience is just like theirs.
The problem with having a diagnosis like this is that a lot of people won’t understand what it’s like to not have the characteristics we take for granted to the point that it seems unreal. To avoid accepting that the scale of people who have experiences that they’ll never be able to understand is bigger than they imagine (and avoid cognitive dissonance), they must invalidate your experience.
This one I’ve always been extremely skeptical of. I suspect it’s more likely they’re lacking introspection to such an extent that they’re not even aware of it.
It just seems highly unlikely that a non brain damaged human sharing the same evolutionary history and ability to use language would not have one, yet be able to speak and converse normally. Their arguments in support of it always seemed weak to me.
It’s in those class of things where people like to be the person that has it (and it’s hard to test or verify)
When I read, I hear my voice. That’s the only time I ever hear a voice in my head. When I think of problems and solutions, I build structures in my mind and navigate those structures, examine them, and solve them. Rubik’s cubes are ridiculously easy.
There’s plenty of introspection, but if anything, it’s hardest to translate some solutions to English. Often, I can’t tell you why “it’s the right answer” other than “the whole structure would collapse” which makes no sense to other people. I used to get points docked on math papers because I couldn’t show my work.
I find software engineering fantastic, because everyone can agree they see the same structure, rendered as code on a screen. We can agree why something is right or wrong or YAGNI. I love working remote because I have more time to compose thoughtful answers to describe/translate what I mean.
Sometimes I need to talk through a problem out loud because the problem and solution exist in the English language (people problems) which is another boon to remote work. So, I talk out loud to myself, quite a bit more than other people do. I have hours of recordings because people look at you weird walking down the street if you’re not holding a phone but speaking out loud.
I can spot a bug a mile away in code, because the code literally becomes a structure in my mind. Bugs stick out as weak points or unstable parts of the structure.
I’m just rambling a bit as I fall asleep, but maybe you won’t be so skeptical now.
It's possible I'm brain damaged, though I've never been diagnosed as such. And of course it's possible I'm lacking introspection. I've spent years honing introspective skills via meditation, but of course if I have blind spots, I wouldn't know about them.
My conscious lived is experience has always been one in which I have no inner voice. No words, in fact. It's totally silent in my head. (It's not still. I have racing thoughts. But they're non-verbal. They seem to be in some sort of "mentalese.") I neither see words nor hear them. And it's impossible for me to imagine what my voice sounds like unless I actually hear myself speak.
I also can't imagine what my wife or friends sound like. My father died a few years ago, and I now can't imagine his voice. I never could unless I heard it. And now that's impossible.
While I know the ideas I want to express, I have no clue what words I'll use to express them until I hear them come out of my mouth or see them on a page or screen. When I type, it seems like my fingers are making up the words. Obviously, that's not what's happening, but I have no sense at all that my mind chose the words.
I also have never felt authorship of anything I've written, even though I'm a published author. I have no sense at all that I've written this paragraph. It's my ideas--it's what I wanted to say--but it's as if someone else chose the words.
I suspect that for everyone, there's a process that goes something like this: mentalese --> coming up with words --> expressing words via speech or writing.
Some folks have no conscious access to the first step. For them, it's entirely unconscious. (mentalese) --> coming up with words --> speaking or writing.
In my case, for some reason I seem to have no conscious access to the choosing-words part. It must happen, of course, but it seems to be hidden from my conscious mind: mentalese --> (coming up with words) --> speaking or writing.
Until fairly recently I thought everyone was like me. When people talked about seeing or hearing words in their heads (or their "inner voice"), I thought they meant it metaphorically. It's still amazing to me that people can imagine or "hear" voices in their heads. So I have the same impulse as you, except in reverse: Come on! An inner voice? I'm skeptical. (Intellectually, I'm not, anymore. But I still feel the pang of skepticism, because it's so alien to me.)
I have no internal monologue. No voice in my head and also no words. I can't even imagine what my voice sounds like (or my wife's voice) unless I hear it. And I also have aphantasia. It's totally silent and totally dark in my head. (And when I'm typing this, I know the ideas I want to communicate, but I have no idea what words I'll use until I see them on the screen.)
> I wonder if anyone in the world has both conditions. That would be interesting to understand how they think.
I think maybe I do? I’ve know about the aphantasia and it wasn’t surprising to me because I always felt like I was missing something when people used phrases like “picture $thing in your mind” but now you’re telling me everyone is talking to themselves in their heads, too? It’s actually so hard for me to wrap my head around I think I must be misunderstanding...
I think you and some others probably are misunderstanding. It's the idea that sometimes when you think, you "think with words". It's the presence or employment of words or language anywhere in your thinking.
Not "hearing" the words or necessarily "talking to yourself" or hearing someone talk to you. I think many people do mentally talk to themselves, but I think that's a sufficient condition to have an internal monologue rather than a necessary condition.
People who don't have it would 100% of the time only ever think about things in terms of visual imagery, symbols, or something else abstract. I believe it's quite rare.
I think I have close to opposite of not having an internal monologue, it is hard for me to turn my internal monologue into an external one. Talking takes a lot of effort and I get tired of doing it after a short while. I've conditioned myself to be able to do it well now, and I can be very articulate, but my wife and son, for instance, can just keep talking and talking and talking. I find it so bizarre.
But I can talk with myself internally for hours on end.
I do think variances in reporting are some of it. I have some visualization skills and wouldn't claim to be "aphantasic", but on the flip side, there is an enormous dividing line between real-world images and these imagined images. While awake I would never confuse the two.
I also suspect a lot of people are massively overreporting the quality of their images. It's very easy to imagine something and think you understand it, until asked to produce something based on it. This isn't just limited to mental images, it's the source of the "why don't you 'just'..." questions, and comes up all the time in building, engineering, artistic endeavors, etc. Your brain is easily convinced it has a thought with more detail than it actually has. I really only trust people who have taken a lot of time to train the relevant system if they claim they have these things. For instance, I really can design some somewhat non-trivial programs in my head... but I've been doing this for ~25 years, and only recently would I say I'm getting to the point where these designs are sometimes good enough that they're not taking serious body blows betwixt conceptualization and realization.
Yeah, I have asked people “ can you visualize Obama’s face on this piece of paper?” They say “oh, yes-perfectly! -it’s like I’m looking at a photograph”
“Could you trace it and come away with a drawing that would compare well with a traced photo?”
They can’t, and I think they are over-reporting the fidelity of their visualizations.
You could (or at least I could with little musical training) fumble around finding the right notes, and with enough time, eventually transcribe the song to sheet music though. mostly accurately.
just because you have no skill in shading and drawing lines doesnt mean that you shouldn't be able to replicate the correct proportions and details in the features of someones face.
Well, the image moves when you try to trace it, because your eyes are jumping around. Then, when you've got a wrong line, your brain tries to fit the imagined image to the wrong line by skewing it, which it does in several different ways once you've got enough wrong lines, so the wrong lines multiply.
A skilled artist can work around this, by drawing the right lines (and erasing / ignoring the wrong lines).
I agree that some people might under/over-estimate their abilities.
However, I am not sure if drawing is the right way to test it. I can visualise a straight line or a perfect circle, but I wouldn't be able to draw them perfectly.
Visualization is a bit confusing in the sense that I can perfectly "see" someone's image in my mind or on the piece of paper, but I cannot draw it that well. It is like a "floating image"? that gives me the person's face in my head, but I if I sit down and try to describe it with minor details or draw it, I cannot.
Yes, this. I honestly don't know if I see things vividly or not well at all because there is no baseline for comparison, such as a traditional vision and color test.
What's more convincing to me than self report of image quality is self report of imagery use. Whether it should be described as aphantasia I don't know, but I never think in a visuospatial way unless I consciously stop and try because the problem really requires it (and even then I feel I'm pretty bad). On the other hand I have friends that describe their ideas in such a visual way almost instantly, and report having imagery pop into their heads naturally.
To me it seems really obvious that relative to my internal monologue, my imagery is much weaker and quantifiably less frequent. So I think at least people that report having imagery much stronger than internal monologue likely have something different going on for real, not just with reporting.
I'm pretty sure it's just in how people report it. I was always quite good at geometry puzzles because I could picture the shapes moving in my head. Does that mean I can see images in my mind or not? It's nothing like seeing with my eyes, but I can definitely "see" it in my mind.
I wonder if those with aphantasia tend to hate reading novels. For me, once I get into a book I basically "see" it playing out in my head and I won't even notice that I'm reading words.
I could totally understand how it would be bland if you were just reading a description and nothing was coming to you.
I guess I have this thing, I had never heard of it before but I have it based on Wikipedia's description, I also have very few memories of my life, which can be disturbing, maybe this is why.
For the record I love novels, inc fantasy fiction and descriptive sci-fi without having a minds eye to bring it into.
e.g. Big fan of starship troopers (the book) which is completely set in an invented universe none of which I have visualized. I saw the film and I can't remember its visual interpretation. (I do remember it being lame compared to the book)
Even without a minds eye I sometimes find some directors visual interpretation jarring.
How do you visualizers get on with the colour of magic? Do you have to see everything?
On the plus side I support two concurrent internal monologues or one that goes double speed & I can go full-duplex.
Let's say somebody shows you a picture of a house for a couple of minutes and then takes it away, is there no way for you to recollect and reproduce anything that was on that picture (visually)?
not the OP but similar to him. I can fleetingly see details individually in my mind, i struggle to really see the whole house. i can see (fleetingly) in my mind how the shutters are built, their material, what color they are, how they fold over the window. and so on for each feature of the house.
reading fiction and fantasy books are also sort of boring for me because i have no mental image of the characters or their settings or faces or anything like that. like if it's describing a blacksmith's forge, sure i know that has a forge and anvil and tools and quenching bucket. but there's not really a cohesive setting in my head of what it looks like for the story.
i also cant really mentally image the faces of people i know. i can see their features but their face in my mind doesn't really look human. i can't imagine someone's whole body including their face. i have no issue recognizing faces and putting them to names in person though.
i have a notoriously bad memory. i still made good grades in school and can study and retain knowledge and skills. but i forget the vast majority of conversations i've had with people after a couple weeks, and my fiance is constantly telling me things i said where i have no memory of saying it.
I have it and I love reading novels. Like I can't "see" your comment or any other comment but I understand what you are saying. Likewise I can't "see" novels but that doesn't mean I can't understand and find them interesting.
To be clear, I don't "see" comments like this. It's pretty specific to engaging content that is apt to be visualized. i.e. I don't tend to visualize books or passages that aren't as engaging to me.
For sure, I understand. Was more trying to say that it is not necessary to visualize comments to enjoy them. Likewise it is not necessary to visualize a book to enjoy it. "For sale, baby shoes, never worn." I don't see the shoes, and I don't see the advertisement but damn if it doesn't make me feel sad.
I can't quite describe how it works, but I still get something out of a visual description. If the author mentions a small red leather book and then later a large wooden book with a blue ribbon across it I get a different "sense" for lack of a better word. I have seen both things and know what they look like even if I can't form a visual picture in my mind while reading it. To be more precise I haven't actually seen a wooden book with a blue ribbon across it, but I have seen both of those items individually and know how it would look if they were combined. But I don't actually have a picture of it in my mind.
I'm aphantasic, and I'd say one advantage is that I'm not bothered by invasive vivid memories or anxiety inducing imagery. Just on a hunch, I think aphantasics are probably less likely to develop PTSD after trauma, as a big component of PTSD appears to be just this kind of pervasive, invasive and hyper-vivid memories. I sometimes feel that I'm missing out on something, but from experiences on psychedelics, which give me closed-eye visuals of geometric shapes and colors which don't go away until the effects pass, I think I prefer the still black void and relative mental silence (apart from the soundless inner monologue) of aphantasia to a 'richer' inner world that I'm not able to shut off. Would be happy to get other aphantasics' (as well as hyperphantasics at the other end of the spectrum) perspective on this
I'm curious what you mean by "soundless inner monologue"? I don't really experience much imagery at all but my inner monologue feels very close to how talking to myself aloud feels, so I wouldn't describe it as soundless. The verbal vividness of my internal monologue is actually how I imagined people with good imagery skills "see".
On the note of advantages, I know I have something weird going on with the back right of my brain specifically (focal slowing on EEG among other things), which I am pretty certain connects to my favoring of verbal over visual thinking. So I guess it depends on the cause of a case of aphantasia, but to me it feels a little like how blind people end up with heightened hearing. I think I've really developed strong verbal skills because of it, and there are definitely advantages to having strong verbal skills.
I recall a professor showing us a study once where students performed better on an exam when they were allowed/encouraged to talk out loud to themselves while they were taking it. He was encouraging us to talk through stuff with ourselves, but at first I found the result weird because I assumed everybody was always talking to themselves in their head. That was the first time it really dawned on me there may be large individual differences in how we experience thoughts.
Late response here, but hoping you might catch it!
I'm also very verbal, as that is the form most of my thinking takes. I do have some very limited visual imagination, but it takes the form of very vague and transparent 'flash' visions, and otherwise it's mostly a kind of spatial sense (I have pretty good spatial orientation, and it often surprises me how some people with vivid visual imaginations can be very easily spatially disoriented).
My inner monologue is running most of the time, and I tend to think in complete sentences, even stopping to rephrase when it doesn't make sense. But it's soundless, as in not being perceived as a sound. I'm a musician and songwriter, so I often sing and make melodies in my head, but these too aren't perceived as sound in any way resembling what I hear with my ears. Hearing your own voice all the time also sounds like an invasive and disturbing experience to me, but I guess everyone is used to their inner world. It seems aphantasia can be uni- or multimodal. I also can't imagine smells or tastes, beyond having a vague idea of whether a combination of flavours will be good. I have heard others describe tasting chocolate in their mouth when imagining it, and that's just not something I've experienced.
So yes, I'm also fascinated by the huge range of inner experiences people have, and how it affects their personality and relationship with the world
By Blake Ross
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Before reading this post I had no idea I had aphantasia and thought everyone else was the same as me, unable to see anything when they closed their eyes. This helped me understand myself and my relationships so much better than ever before. Thanks Blake!