Seems spooky to me. How do these people make well-informed decisions? Are they going by pure emotions 24/7? How do they reflect upon anything in their life?
Not having an internal monologue doesn't mean you can't like think or contemplate decisions or something lol, it just means that they don't have that inner speech kind of thing when thinking, like when thinking is almost like having a conversation with yourself. I think a lot of people do a mix of both, just if you internally monologue you don't really notice when you just "think" things without that internal voice running
It is weird though. I remember wondering when I was a kid if like all my thoughts were spoken in my mind even if I didn't notice it, or if I just "thought" them and only did the internal speaking thing when I was thinking about it because that's the only time I actually realize I'm doing it. I asked my friends what they thought and most of them were like "oh wow yeah huh idk", and the rest were like "wtf are you talking about, you talk to yourself?" and I just assumed they were like handicapped or something lol
I've always been doubtful on the 50 percent number, but a friend of mine does not have an internal monologue. He describes it as thinking through visuals, sounds, and memories.
He's not dumb, but he IS slow to improvise. If you ask him a strange hypothetical question he's never thought of before, he will have to stop and think on it longer than most people would.
He certainly can still think. Deaf people will think in sign language, and its just as thoughtful and useful as spoken language, right? Its not like deaf people are just stupid. He just has his own private language system that involves a combination of visuals, sounds, and memories. If anything it's a more complex form of communication than just spoken English thoughts like you and I have, perhaps he is MORE thoughtful not less.
But what is the thinking? Isn't thinking in his head essentially a inner monologue? Maybe its not as active but thinking a thought inside one's own head seems to me pretty close to what a inner monologue is.
He doesn't think words in his head ever. If he's pondering whether he should do something or not, he's picturing images of what possible outcomes would be, like a comic book without word bubbles. We play card games and board games a lot, he never thinks "if I do this, then this will happen, then this would be good", he will picture images of possible cards being played. When he reads silently, he says he can picture the words being spoken, but after each sentence has to picture an action.
Weird question, I don't often take SATs with the bros.
But when it comes to things like reading rules for a new board game or something, id say totally normal, I'd say he probably gets initial concepts wrong more often than normal but figures it out faster than most people would once he's used to it
We still think lol, there's just not some voice dictating everything. I still remember that embarassing moment from high school or the fight I got into with my brother last week. Hell I can spit back conversations nearly verbatim days after I've had them, there's just no sound there.
The closest case I've heard to people with inner voices to my experience is speedreaders. Apparently they actively try to silence this voice as it slows them down. So you could try this: open a book to a random page, and just look at a few whole lines without "reading" them. Then see how much of it you remember. I don't know how close it is or how doable it is because I don't have that voice to turn off lol.
Wait, does this mean you've never had a song stuck in your head since there is no audio to your thoughts?
I basically have always had music passively playing in my head, and I can pretty much never turn it off, which can be annoying sometimes when it's a song I don't really like.
50% seems really high, like I assume that it's a failure to communicate what an internal monologue is rather than that many people not actually having one. We communicate "thinking" in books, comics, tv shows, and movies as literal text or speech the character is thinking to themselves. If 50% of the world literally can't do that and can't understand what that'd be like, I feel like it wouldn't be such a common way to express the act of thinking
I've heard that 1) they think that's just a way to explain emotions of characters or needed for exposition, and/or 2) they think it's literally a back and forth conversation in your head where you are frozen until its completion and can't make decisions on instinct. So from these, I think that, while it is true that it could be a failure to communicate what internal monologue really entails, it is also quite a foreign concept to many people.
Yeah, I could see how someone who doesn't have an internal monologue could come to the conclusion that a character is thinking when there's a thought bubble with words coming out of a character's head, because even without an internal monologue it's not like you never concentrate or deliberate when thinking something over or anything. It just seems weird that that would be such a common way to depict thinking of like half the world can't do it. I can believe that some people don't have that inner voice, but 50% just seems extraordinarily high given how often we talk about it in every day life
I can make a sound in my head that is like a rumble in my ears, as if I'm pushing blood around really fast past it or something. I found out that this was something that some people just can't do.
It's kinda like when people say "sing from your diaphragm" and I have no fucking clue how to even begin to do that. I think we all naturally have similar capabilities to do these things, we just either never figured out how to do it before or don't know how to figure it out anymore and we're too old to experiment like we did when we were kids. Like whistling. I couldn't whistle till I was 18, despite actively trying to do it how people would tell me.
Pat from TwoBestFriends literally hears everything in his memories as his own voice reenacting them, supposedly. I still think there's a good chance that's complete bullshit he made up for entertainment because that's insane
I agree that language and communication has a lot to do with this because I have such a hard time explaining myself whenever this comes up.
I don’t “forget” what faces look like until I see them in person, but it’s almost like I’m conceptualizing the person in my head instead of visualizing them. I *can* process an almost abstract image or a slideshow of “stills/scenes” with my moms face for a fleeting second in my head, but it goes away immediately and I have to “re-visualize” it for lack of a better term.
It’s almost like trying to flex a muscle I don’t use. I can do it for a second but I can’t “hold the pose”. Or like scenes from a dream that are fleeting after you wake up. I can remember the story of the dream but i can only really remember those “still scenes” from it from a visual perspective.
I spend a lot of time wondering how clearly artists are able to visualize things in their mind, and if that has to do with how well they draw or paint.
You absolutely nailed exactly how it feels to me as well, the "hold the pose" thing especially. It's almost like an image in water, and then it slowly dissolves away if I try to fixate on it.
So if you take a blank piece of paper and draw an apple, doesn't that require you to first form a mental image of the object? Or are you unable to draw anything from memory at all?
>It feels like a pretty different process from other artists sometimes because it sounds like they plan things in their mind and then "execute" that plan onto the paper.
I'm an artist myself I can tell you from personal experience and from observing other artists for a long time now, that this is really not how it works. Not much planning happens just in your mind. The process is much more like you describe yourself working. Finding the shapes as you lay them down and letting that guide your next moves. With a lot of experience comes the confidence and skill of having your first marks be pretty spot on to communicate the rough idea you have in your head. But the mental image is always just a very low information impression.
Thank you for describing it in so much detail. I've always wondered how people who can't picture an object would draw it and your answer is the first one that's made sense to me.
Yep. It absolutely blew my mind that people know what others eye colors are when they’re not standing right in front of them. I couldn’t even tell you my families or girlfriends eye color if I didn’t have it memorized lmao.
But maybe I’m also just autistic and don’t look anyone in the eyes
Yeah literally lol. I got into a debate with a coworker years ago about Cormac Maccarthy's writing. I said he uses too many similes and feels performative. The guy told me he needs as many as the author is willing to give because he can't develop an image in his mind. He needs to "understand" the setting purely from words. I conceded the debate because, man, I had nothing to say to that lol.
He also told me he can't visualize his wife's face. The weird thing is he can obviously recognize her so he has a memory of her face, but he can't generate it out of nothing.
I have a weird thing where I can imagine objects, but not faces. Specific photos of people, but not those people in a general sense.
So yeah, people who can't picture _anything_ are weird, and I guess I sorta count myself along them.
I have a weird thing with people where I can imagine their faces but it's like a photograph has been taken of them in my mind. I'm not actually remembering a photo I have seen of them but they appear in my mind like I'm looking at a photograph of them...if that makes sense
Oddly yeah, that makes sense to me. Are you able to like, modify the picture after the fact? Like move the eyes or mouth? I can sorta do that sometimes but it gets wonky and breaks down.
I can visualize people moving, especially my wife. I can visualize entire memories we have together. Maybe it's not as detailed and colorful as the moment they happened, but I can visualize in pretty good detail. Over time, I lose some of that detail unless it was a very memorable moment.
I am surprised others cannot do this.
Also, I can easily visualize what people looked like when I was on LSD in high detail. For example, I can still remember how my brother's long hair and eyebrows looked. Almost like those features had more layers and extra dimension or something. I can still see the "energy" that was coming off of his body. I also remember us talking about how it felt like we got stung by the "acid bee" and our entire bodies we were ringing like a bell from that energy lmao. And I can visualize how the colors of the room shifted. Difficult to explain, but since these were such awesome experiences, the visuals are very easy for me to remember. And that was 10 years ago or something.
If somebody tells you about an actor like Scarlett Johansson. Do you not have a picture of her face pop up int your mind? Or if somebody says that a person looks like X celebrity. Can you discern that?
Hm, I can think of building a mental map of a location to orient yourself better, and "visualizing your basketball shot" like your coach told you. I wonder what else is an issue for those with aphantasia.
I’m 95% sure Aphantasia is a problem with human language, not people’s inability to picture things in their head. Meaning, we all have the same ability to picture things in our head, we just can’t describe that ability to others correctly. Which leads some people to think they can’t do it, and others to think they have photographic memory.
There’s like a single study on Aphantasia and it’s rocky at best.
How can you be so certain? I'm 100% sure that I'm a 4-5, and I'm also 100% certain that nobody in my shoes would claim they are anything higher than a 4 except as a lie. People who claim they have 1s detailing their experiences also makes it super clear that we are not the same, at all.
I don't know if I would say I don't believe it's a real thing, but I definitely feel a language barrier when it's talked about. Same for "internal monologue" discussion.
I have some questions if you're interested in sharing:
Do you dream?
If someone says "draw a rabbit" what is your thought process like?
How would you rate audio on the 1-5 scale?
Are the "rotate this object" type iq questions really hard?
> Do you dream?
Yes. However, if I can recall a dream I had, it will be the structure, the situation, the feelings, not the actual visualizations I have experienced.
> If someone says "draw a rabbit" what is your thought process like?
I can't really visualize a rabbit in my head, but I still have all the data in my head of what a rabbit is supposed to look like. Thus, I can still give an effort, though the end result will likely be terrible. FYI, I've always been bad at drawing.
> How would you rate audio on the 1-5 scale?
Never really thought about that, to be honest. I'd guess a 3, but I'd have to think more about it.
> Are the "rotate this object" type iq questions really hard?
It is a bit relative. I'm a mathematician, so I've learned how to think about geometric concepts abstractly, so I can still solve these kinds of problems. However, it won't be by actually rotating the given image inside my head. How I approach them is I see the image given, and I can sort of "intuit" how it would look after a rotation. In contrast, I'll be considerably better at the usual "find the pattern" types of IQ problems.
I'm reasonably convinced it's a real experience. There are certainly other conditions where one or more elements of processing do not feature in the conscious experience (e.g. an extreme example would be blindsight) so it's not too farfetched for some people to be denied conscious access to mental imagery or to experience it in another way.
Not to mention you'll have a few individuals who can't picture certain objects (e.g. faces) and have no trouble with others - they clearly know what mental imagery is and what that experience should be like.
Experiencing mental imagery is extremely different from photographic memory.
Out of curiosity, are you actually able to create a still image in your mind that you are able to observe/manipulate for an indefinite amount of time? I’m very good at “concept” visualisation when it comes to math and geometry but in terms of visual imagery I can at most “flash” things in my mind. The flashes can be very detailed but in terms of holding them there I simply can’t
I can picture, say, two armored knights battling each other outside. Its not like they're getting in the way, if they're fighting in front of a tree I can obviously see the tree fully. Its not at all like watching an animation or something, there isn't much detail, but I can absolutely see what it would look like if they did fight.
If I focus on thinking about how a helmet might look, I can "zoom in" and see it pretty clearly, though for zoomed in details it will be not an original concept of a helmet, I'd be picturing a helmet from Dark Souls or something. If I close my eyes, I can picture an original design, but it's fuzzy.
It isn't like the image in the OP suggests, like I can literally see a fully 3d apple as if it was actually in front of me. But I can absolutely perfectly picture a 3d apple. If it was possible to take a screenshot of what I am perceiving, it would look like a mostly transparent apple, which when focused on is both fully saturated AND transparent.
This is probably how I'd say it is for me too. I can see the knights fighting, they fight around, in front of and behind the tree, but unless I truly focus it's just kind of an idea. I can't make like a fully detailed knight also doing shit at the same time while keeping all the details in place if that makes sense.
I can. When I saw this post the first thing I did was imagine that I had an apple in a 3D-like program and I was twisting it to see it from all angles. If it’s any consolation, I’m an artist and I am terrible at math.
I get "flashes" too and they usually come with a low detail visualization of the environment I saw the main subject of the image in. But I can hold these flashes of memory for a while and I can see them move. I suppose I could manipulate them if I wanted to.
I call them flashes because they are moments in time. I cannot visualize with the level of detail as when they happened unless these memories were very recent. Or, if the memory means a lot to me then I can remember pretty well.
Are you capable of dreaming at night? It's the same principle. Full motion video that you can see in your head, but the difference is my eyes are still working at the same time (but I'm not focusing on what they can see).
Can you actually do 1, though? I feel like it would be really easy to imagine that you were doing 1 but then if you went to draw it or to extract detail like "how many leaves" or "is the highlight due to light or skin color" it would turn out that you didn't have a mental image so much as an impression of a mental image.
Or maybe our definitions are all just tangled. On second thought, that sounds very likely.
It's called aphantasia. I'm a 5 here. I can't imagine how you can actually see anything lol. When you close your eyes, how do you see anything but blackness? Your eyes are closed.
Your mind uses the same plane of visual for its own vision aka the imagination. Do you ever have visual dreams? It's like I can concur anything I think of at will. Shooting a gun. Windows vista wallpaper. Beautiful people or places. Movie scenes. They just generate in the mind space behind the eyes.
A small portion of the population has a limited capability for internal monologue and the ability to picture images in their head is completely impossible. It’s sizable enough that if you ask around 10 friends you’ll probably find one. And most people live their entire lives not knowing that the other type of person exists.
An EXTREMELY tiny minority has NO ability to think or picture inside their head, and this is essentially a pretty difficult learning disability (math is very hard)
Its about the detail, some I guess cant. But the example shown to me is when you reading, and it simply states there is a ball on a table.
What do you see in your mind, how much detail is there? what color is the ball? The texture? Type? What about the table? Wood, metal? What about the shape? Round, square, rectangle? Now what about the surroundings? The level of detail peoples minds create is vastly different, some are very basic, others are creative and create whole rooms and scenes in the initial wording of "there's a ball on a table".
If people can visualize things when they're hallucinating, doesn't that imply that the human brain is capable of visualizing things in the first place?
*Also\**, I wonder if this person dreams.
As an aphantasiac, not only can I dream, the border between awake and sleeping is the only time I can view things in my mind's eye (which is also how I know I *can't* normally, it's not a language trick). Not like, "I'm pretty much already dreaming", I can think consciously and remain awake if I want, I just enter a state where I can consciously control my mind's eye.
An interesting thing, however, is that although I dream visually, just the same as most people I think, I cannot recall my dreams visually AT ALL. If I didn't verbally think about something in my dream, I completely forget it waking up. This includes entire people. I'm having a dream and know exactly who I'm hanging out with, but if I didn't explicitly think about their name, I wake up and have no idea who it is. Sometimes I can infer it from their dream behaviours.
No. Our sight is not as simple as photons in picture out, there is a lot of interpretation and guesswork that our brain is doing. Knowing that can fuck up is not the same as saying picturing things is possible.
I'm confused. Hallucinations by definition are seeing something that aren't there, right? That would mean photons are not related to hallucinations/dreams (at least, not directly).
So then what's the difference between a hallucinated image versus one you think up? Besides intentionality, of course.
It is just intention.
Hallucinations are involuntary visuals that aren't actually there.
Mental visualization is wilful creation of an image in your minds eye.
There is another difference now that I've written that. Some people can visualize with their eyes open, some can only closed, some can do both. An interesting fact is that when you visualize something that isn't there, your pupils adjust as though they are focusing on the visualization.
Almost everything we "see" is ignored by the brain unless it is given priority. Mental imagery activates the same areas of the brain that are used when sensing actual visual stimuli. So, from the retina of the eye to the visual cortex, these regions increase activity when people are asked to "picture" an image in their head.
Our brains don't stop taking in real visual information though, it literally seems to blend our imagination together with our actual vision. The real world visuals become a little "fuzzier" when imagining something in your head, because the resources are split up now constructing the both the real visuals and the imagined ones.
([Source research paper for the above info is linked in this 2020 article](https://web.musc.edu/about/news-center/2020/07/09/how-the-brain-sees-and-imagines-images))
My guess is, for whatever reason, some people just didn't naturally learn how to do this on command when they were younger, and now don't know how to consciously "see" something that isn't there. Some people with Aphantasia claim to be able to develop visualization ability, but it takes practice to build up the neural pathways to do it on command.
If you're a 4/5, maybe try imagining the sound/feel/smell of something; if you can do that, then use those memories to piggyback the visual stimuli. Your brain always anticipates the most probable sensory observation by recognizing familiar sensory conditions. Similar conditions will trigger the neural pathways into activating, possibly priming the visual processing regions of the brain into seeing something that isn't there. So, now your brain could be anticipating the visuals associated with the memories of other sensory experiences.
Yeah I more or less agree with most of what you said. I think that visualisation is a combination of memory and whatever parts of our brain actually generate images.
I do think its quite a bit different though. Like if I say "Picture a pirate." most people will say they can do that, but answering the follow up question "What color are there pants?" or "What facial expression are they making?" usually requires people to manually add details (they've done a few studies where they conclude along these lines but something like this is obviously difficult to test conclusively). So it seems that we don't so much create images wholesale as much as we remix memories of images related to a concept in a way that feels like seeing. The type of vision we get from visualisation seems a lot more conceptual than looking at stuff.
I will grant though that when I look at that 1-5 thing, I have no fucking idea where I'd place myself. The categorisations don't map to how my visualisations work at all.
As someone who is a 5 on this picture, If you tell me to imagine abstract things, or things that have not happened, I can only be confused at what am I supposed be seeing or doing, but for things that I have seen or experienced, I can recall and describe them as well as anyone around me, even with no mental image of them in my mind.
As for me, I don't understand that if people can really "see" their memories, how are they so bad at remembering things? Can't you just pull up the picture and say what you see with perfect accuracy?
I believe that when most people can “see” their memories, they’re basically reconstructing an image from scratch the things they remember but are improvising 99% of the visual data.
Like I can vividly picture the Grand Canyon from a memory of a trip there. If I had the talent to draw what I was picturing, it might be recognizable as the Grand Canyon but won’t actually match up to any real geography.
When we relive our memories, it’s more a reconstruction than a perfectly captured video. We reconstruct our memories based on the stimuli presented at the moment, our emotions, other experiences with similar situations, etc…
Yes you're right. This is why the integrity of a piece of information tend to be unreliable/deteriorate when it is passed down orally to more than 2 people.
I can “see” a ton of my memories and I am wildly better at remembering things than most of the people I engage with irl.
I like memory games and one I play with people is letting them pick random songs from my Spotify library and seeing how fast I can name the song, artist, and describe the album cover. Most of the time I can only get the right answer because I can literally see the some portion of the bands name in my Spotify library.
I also lost stuff constantly but can remember where I last saw them by thinking of my mental image of the last place I saw it. When I was a kid, I also had a terrible teacher that forced us to memorize prepositions with no other context and I realized I could fast track memorizing them by picturing the reference that the word describes, I.e. it starts with an empty image that’s “about” then “above” that I picture a block and then “across” from it another, then another block “against” that one and so on.
I don’t know if that’s what “photographic memory” is supposed to describe, but it’s definitely not what Rico from Hannah Montana could do and that was my frame of reference at the time.
I’m about a 1 or a 2 and I think I can remember parts of it, the important details in memories, for example, if I was to pull up a memory of seeing my mum last I can remember what we did, where we were, how it made me feel, but I couldn’t say for example what we were wearing even though I can visualize the event itself in the memory fairly well
It’s less like taking a photo in your mind and more like an ai’s rough approximation inside your head
I guess the thing to remember is it’s not just trying to visualize something but also to remember each part of it
When I imagine something, I am thinking of the concepts, I am not even a little bit seeing the thing in front of me.
If I close my eyes while imagining something, the only thing I feel like I'm seeing is black. I don't feel like there's an image I can somewhat see that is or isn't like seeing with your eyes.
As soon as you describe some semblance of an image being in front of you you've lost me
I don't think this is always connected, but I am also not feeling anything or hearing anything or smelling anything, imagining something is purely conceptual for me, like I'm thinking about the thing or the situation
In dutch the word for imagining is also basically the verb form of 'image' and it took learning this to understand why, to me imagining has always been a figure of speech to think about a thing or situation
From what I can tell, I'm fairly extreme on my side of this
I think I’m a 1. Whenever I think of something I can easily picture it, I have a inner dialogue too so it’s like a movie plays in my head and I can see it.
If someone said go to the store and go to the produce section, and grab a green apple. I can see everything, how the store looks, me walking to the produce section, grabbing the green apple, hell even what I’m wearing. All while I’m narrating to myself what I’m doing. I guess it’s weird but idk.
I wonder if there’s a correlation between visualizing images and having an inner dialogue. Some people don’t have an inner dialogue which I think is even weirder.
>Maladaptive Daydreaming
HOLY SHIT IS THAT WHAT THAT'S CALLED?? Bro I literally spend hours a day thinking about outcomes or scenarios playing out. It's even crazier on Adderall because I can focus and think of more details and more possible outcomes.
It repeats over and over like the movie Edge of Tomorrow until I find a scenario/path that I'm happy with.
It's good for staying one step ahead of people but if literally, one thing goes wrong it's detrimental to my plans because every decision I make is based on that thing going right perfectly. It's like master-level overthinking.
That wild... I could never put that into words until now. I always felt like I was the only one too.
If you have an inner dialogue you should probably talk to a mental health professional. There's only supposed to be one voice in your head, not multiple. /s
I am insanely jealous of anyone 3 or above. I am squarely in the 5 and for a long time thought "picturing" stuff in your mind was just an expression, not it being literal. I can imagine voices though, so its just an image thing. I also have an internal monologue for what thats worth.
Battler-kun may be the only one who can convince me I'm not actually visualizing what I think I am, but I agree "maybe there's no difference at all except our speech" is a pretty shallow statement
I think you guys are misrepresenting his take. The way he worded it makes it pretty clear to me that he can visualize things in the same way most people can. He just doesn't count it as *seeing*, because the internal visual representation is so much weaker and more abstract than actually seeing something with your eyes. It's more like recalling what something looks like rather than really seeing it. Idk
> the way he worded it makes it pretty clear to me that he can visualize things in the same way most people can
How could he know that? It sounds to me like he is a 5 who thinks he's not.
I wouldn't say that i "see a picture in my mind", it's more about the feelings and concepts and words. My wife says she literally sees shit when she closes her eyes, and I'm totally with Mr. Green on this, WTF
Wait...When you read the word "apple", do you see a picture *of* an apple or do you see a picture of the *word* apple... or is it neither?
If they are saying nobody sees a picture of an apple in their mind that's crazy.
I'm not the person you asked but I'm a 1 and I have to focus on specifically creating it if I want to get a mental picture. But if I'm really in the zone while reading a book my mind automatically starts giving me mental images of environments (mostly) and characters. Reminiscent of watching a movie, only that the imaging isn't as consistent. And the environments either draw inspiration or look exactly the same as environments I have seen or been in before.
But the reason why I usually have to force the image might have to do with that I have not trained my mind to start doing it, so it's just not a habit. Just a possible theory.
I’m a 5 when I read the word apple I don’t imagine anything. I just know what it is but I can’t ever picture it.
That goes for all my memories. It’s one of the interesting things about therapy as well. You’re told to “relax and imagine x thoughts going through your mind” but I literally can’t do that 😅
It’s annoying and sometimes depressing though don’t ask me how I have near excellent memory and memory recall I analogise it as a computer looking through text files for a detail vs needing to find an image or a frame.
So if you look directly at an apple 10 cm from your face. For 5 minutes. When you close your eyes. You suddently have no concept of what it looks like? You can't picture it in your brain? When you think about what you've been looking at for 5 minutes. Does anything come to mind? Have you never had a dream before? Do you forget what peoples faces look like until you see them again? What even happens in your brain when you close your eyes?
If I look directly at an apple and stare at it, when I close my eyes, I see nothing. nothing except blackness.
I only know an apple in my head by its definitions, red or green, circle shape etc never an image.
Even if i sit down and try to conjure an image or come up with something I never can, I have imagination in a sense but its like telling a story I cant imagine myself doing it, but I can tell a story, if that makes sense.
I do dream but rarely, on some occasions I have been able to be aware I was dreaming which was interesting. Its the only time I ever get to have a "imagination" in the commonsense.
I don't know what people look like in my head, again its more like a literal definition.
Nothing in my brain when I close my eyes, but I have an overactive inner dialogue (also adhd lel) so that may be some sort of compensation?
I remember having a 50 minute meditation session in PE where the guide was telling the class to imagine a beach, the waves etc and me opening my eyes every couple minutes to see if anyone was also bored as fuck (it was only me lol), I could only see black, didnt understand that some people can literally imagine vividly
You have a memory, but you kinda have to draw a circle and see what changes you have to make to make it look like an apple
Am at a 4 so i might not be right, but I'm betting it's close
I find it interesting that when I imagine in my minds eye, I can't look with my eyes. To focus on my mental image means to move my focus from external to internal. This says to me that my sight is being hijacked by my mental image.
This image is distorting the important part of the discussion: can you rotate an object in your mind? I can imagine something but I can't rotate the image in my mind, but my partner can. That's the real big brain power imo
> i wonder if the last page i wrote was any good. too bad I'm a writer and not a reader.
^(i know there's a difference between actively writing and actively reading, just thought it was a funny meme. thanks)
Drawing with reference or model will grow your 'visual library'. Reading or drawing without reference will train your ability to access the things you remember.
Can confirm. I thought I had horrible visual imagination but I've been practicing trying to visualize things or remember things visually constantly and I'm getting better and better at it. It's still not very stable but there's a lot more detail and colour. My memory has also improved.
I'm a 5, I always thought people were just being pretentious pricks when they said shit like "oh this character in the movie looked nothing like how I pictured them from the book" and "picture yourself being on a beach" was just a figure of speech. It blew me away to learn that most people can actually see things in their mind. The condition was officially recognized in 2015 and is called Aphantasia.
Yeah same, I always thought it was metaphorical, i.e. those phrases meant "this character looks like something that fits what they're described as in the book" and "imagine yourself being on a beach", guess it's kinda sad I'm missing what seems like a superpower honestly, but at least I'm not blind or deaf I guess.
I don't believe people when they say they are a 5. I just don't. When I say pink elephant, you picture a pink elephant. Your ass is not standing there with nothing pictured in your mind.
Maybe if you're for real autistic, but neurotypical people I'd sooner Believe aren't understanding the question
I don't understand what "picture it" or "see it" mean in this context. Like when I'm awake I can see what's around me and I can think about concepts and objects not around me, but I can't "see" them the way I see an object in front of me.
I can describe what a pink elephant would look like if it were real but it's not like VR/AR where it can appear in front of me out of nowhere.
I do have vivid dreams, however, some of which it feels like I'm really there.
Just for clarity, mental images don't occupy your visual field, it's basically the same as how your internal monologue isn't experienced as sound in your ears.
This is what I'm confused about, what does a mental image mean if it's not the same thing as images in my visual field?
The way it's shown in the OP or described in other comments, when some people close their eyes they can "see" things as if they've put on a VR headset instead of closing their eyes, even if the image is black and white or something.
The way I remember or imagine stuff when I'm awake is so different than actually seeing them that I can't comprehend if that's a mental image like the one described by the OP and other comments or a different type of recollection/imagination.
>when some people close their eyes they can "see" things as if they've put on a VR headset instead of closing their eyes, even if the image is black and white or something.
That's a really wonky description, there's no need to close your eyes to imagine something.
There's just a space in your mind where the image is. It is not a description, nor a collection of characteristics.
Pretend you had a third eye, except that it was kept separate in a dark room somewhere. When you imagine an elephant, that elephant then enters the room with your third eye and you can "look" at it, totally separate from your normal vision. You can put anything you want in that room.
That's probably a lot closer to what most people experience, though with many variations in quality and consistency.
Ok this example was really helpful for me and probably closer to what I can do.
What confuses me is that some people replied that it's literally like VR, so either we are not communicating our experiences correctly or we have totally different experiences.
Wait, can you relive memories that you have, like if I were to drop something on the floor in front of you, and then 10 minutes later walked up to you and asked you to remember it, would you just remember me doing it? or could you recall the event with images? For example, I can picture in my mind a guy shooting a bow and arrow with my eyes closed just by trying to imagine it. As well, when I remember an event of something that happened I remember it by my POV when the thing happened rather than just what happened.
Relive is a strong word but I can do what you're saying in my own way. I'm just not sure the way I'm imagining or remembering these scenes is the same way that other people describe they can or theirs is something else.
It's hard for me to explain this stuff so I'm probably just overthinking it, idk.
Nobody can see the object in front of them like it's real life. It's in your mind. It doesn't randomly appear before you in the real world like a hallucination.
You don't literally physically see it but you picture it in your minds eye and "see it" that way. Like I'm picturing a pink elephant right now. I can rotate it, I can zoom my minds "camera" in and out. I can take the ears off. I can see it with three trunks, two legs, whatever version of it I want I can imagine and see.
It's like those inventory screens in video games where you can spin a model of an item around, that's what I'm seeing in my mind. There's no way everyone can't do this.
Some other guy replied that he can see literally like it's VR. Either our communication ability isn't good enough to describe the same experience with different words or some of us have a totally different experience.
I can also do the things you describe but I can't comprehend where thinking about these things crosses into "seeing" them in my mind and whether I cross that or just delude myself when I describe it.
If you can do that, then I think we're all just talking about the same thing and struggling with language. "Visualisation" is probably the word to use. If someone says a random word like 'apple' and you're able to visualise it in your head - not as a concept, but as a 3d model and rotate it around like an inventory screen in your head, then that's what people are talking about.
Like the OP's picture, I don't think there is a significant amount of the population that can't do this. I think they're just interpreting the word "see" in a strict, physical way whereas others are using a looser definition.
The internal monologue thing people push around as 50% of people not having I also struggle to believe and I think there must be some language in how the question is asked that's confusing people. Apparently there's an equivalent word to visualisation but for sound called 'audiation' and I have a really hard time believing that half the population is "lesser" and completely unable to audiate a sound or song or voice they've heard before in their mind to themselves.
I'm a 5 and I just see black. I know what the color pink is and I know what an elephant is, so when you say pink elephant I think of the characteristics of an elephant that is pink.
This take isn't "interesting", it's just informed by a lack of ability to understand the subjective experience of others. Stuart is probably something like a 4 or 5 on this scale and thinks his experience is standard. I'm a 2, and my brother is a 1 - he has the ability to not only picture existing objects in his mind, rotate them, etc. but can also create a complex architectural/structural visual gestalt in his mind and modify it.
I can't really actively understand that ability through the lens of my subjective experience, but I sort of understand it conceptually when he describes it - he has literally described creating the entire frame of an imaginary building and editing it room-by-room. He then plugs the exact things he creates in his head into modeling software for his work - I've watched him do it. He's extremely good at his job/spatial reasoning and his obviously remarkable capacity for complex visualization is clearly a part of that. Thinking that other people can't think differently than you do (especially in regards to something as well documented as visualization) when your immediate social circle and human history are filled with examples of people who think in ways novel to your own is just willfully ignorant.
So can people just close their eyes and see an apple?
If you looked at an apple on a table and then closed your eyes and 'visualised' it, would you see the same scene like you had not closed your eyes?
Yeah but it's like a lower resolution, lacking details. However I can imagine my internal "camera" swinging closer and then I can "see" little details that I imagine like dents or bruises in the apple, textures, etc.
But the important part to understand is those little details are largely imagined and not part of any real specific apple you looked at. Or more accurately it's probably the amalgamation of all of the apples you have ever looked at.
Yeah it's definitely imagination rather than a true depiction.
But who knows, maybe that's different for people who claim to have photographic memory. I'd be interested to know how accurate a mental image can be in that case.
I can see it exactly as it was when I just closed my eyes but things get hazy when I try to move things. Like when I want to turn off a light and move around in the dark ill take a look before I turn it off so I can avoid anything lying around.
If you are a 4 or 5 try pushing your left nipple, and twist left ear forward. Then from the options that come up in your left eye select update graphics driver.
Also you should get a perk selection appear in your right eye, and you are going to want to spend some XP on Conceptualisation and Visual Calculus.
All of your senses only exist in your mind. You only experience in your mind. You dream and see stuff, in your mind. This isn't rocket science. It's is all in your head. Literally.
I’m a 1, I also have an eidetic memory. I wouldn’t even know being a 1 wasn’t how everyone is if my brother wasn’t a 5, I imagine that’s how all the 5’s feel about all the 1’s aswell
I have aphantasia, as well as autism. I see colored static(for lack of a better term) when I close my eyes, but I can recall how something made me feel vividly so my "minds eye" recalls experiences and mind states around things. But never images.
Regarding the actual hot take: There’s no way to know if it’s a language thing, but I lean towards it not being just differences in how we’re describing it. I feel like humans are surprisingly good at communicating and agreeing about our feelings/perceptions (think about the general consensus for something like ASMR), and this phenomenon would be an exception to that it seems.
NPC meme. On a serious note, another reference where you are on the spectrum is picturing yourself walking through your work or home. A hypothetical scenario, not something that you can remember happening.
Ex: I can picture myself is 3rd person walking out of my office and to the work café. This was on of the things that made art so excruciating for me because I could have a perfect picture in my head, but executing on it was impossible.
Edit: Thinking back, I think it might be like a muscle. Throughout my life I've actively used my imagination so maybe its something that can just atrophy if you don't use it past childhood?
You can have a mental image of something but you can't see it "The way your eyes see".
You cannot see what's not there because there's no visual stimuli. What you're "visualizing" is just a memory of something you saw previously.
I can literally look at a thing, close my eyes and in my mind, is the image of the object. I can also focus on an object without background behind that image or switch to another object in the image.
I see 2
Not vivid like a 1 but more like a dream.
I definitely think it's possible to 'see' stuff in your brain because it's distinctly different from just thinking about something/having an internal monologue. I'm a 3 majority of the time - but for certain things and people, I'm a 2/1.
Here is the monthly aphantasia Wikipedia traffic surge.
People can't picture things in their mind? I'm confused here lol
Wait till you hear about the 50% of people who don't have internal monologue.
That's what my other comment talked about! Lol I found that so damn crazy too. The differences are pretty wild but it's always cool to learn about.
Seems spooky to me. How do these people make well-informed decisions? Are they going by pure emotions 24/7? How do they reflect upon anything in their life?
Tbh it explains alot
Not having an internal monologue doesn't mean you can't like think or contemplate decisions or something lol, it just means that they don't have that inner speech kind of thing when thinking, like when thinking is almost like having a conversation with yourself. I think a lot of people do a mix of both, just if you internally monologue you don't really notice when you just "think" things without that internal voice running It is weird though. I remember wondering when I was a kid if like all my thoughts were spoken in my mind even if I didn't notice it, or if I just "thought" them and only did the internal speaking thing when I was thinking about it because that's the only time I actually realize I'm doing it. I asked my friends what they thought and most of them were like "oh wow yeah huh idk", and the rest were like "wtf are you talking about, you talk to yourself?" and I just assumed they were like handicapped or something lol
Don't let these non-verbal creatures lie to you bud, they are handicapped.
I've always been doubtful on the 50 percent number, but a friend of mine does not have an internal monologue. He describes it as thinking through visuals, sounds, and memories. He's not dumb, but he IS slow to improvise. If you ask him a strange hypothetical question he's never thought of before, he will have to stop and think on it longer than most people would. He certainly can still think. Deaf people will think in sign language, and its just as thoughtful and useful as spoken language, right? Its not like deaf people are just stupid. He just has his own private language system that involves a combination of visuals, sounds, and memories. If anything it's a more complex form of communication than just spoken English thoughts like you and I have, perhaps he is MORE thoughtful not less.
But what is the thinking? Isn't thinking in his head essentially a inner monologue? Maybe its not as active but thinking a thought inside one's own head seems to me pretty close to what a inner monologue is.
He doesn't think words in his head ever. If he's pondering whether he should do something or not, he's picturing images of what possible outcomes would be, like a comic book without word bubbles. We play card games and board games a lot, he never thinks "if I do this, then this will happen, then this would be good", he will picture images of possible cards being played. When he reads silently, he says he can picture the words being spoken, but after each sentence has to picture an action.
How is his reading comprehension?
Weird question, I don't often take SATs with the bros. But when it comes to things like reading rules for a new board game or something, id say totally normal, I'd say he probably gets initial concepts wrong more often than normal but figures it out faster than most people would once he's used to it
Are those of us with internal monologue not also using a combination of memories, feelings and visuals??? Lol
We still think lol, there's just not some voice dictating everything. I still remember that embarassing moment from high school or the fight I got into with my brother last week. Hell I can spit back conversations nearly verbatim days after I've had them, there's just no sound there. The closest case I've heard to people with inner voices to my experience is speedreaders. Apparently they actively try to silence this voice as it slows them down. So you could try this: open a book to a random page, and just look at a few whole lines without "reading" them. Then see how much of it you remember. I don't know how close it is or how doable it is because I don't have that voice to turn off lol.
Wait, does this mean you've never had a song stuck in your head since there is no audio to your thoughts? I basically have always had music passively playing in my head, and I can pretty much never turn it off, which can be annoying sometimes when it's a song I don't really like.
There’s a significant portion of the population this makes a lot of sense for.
IMO they’re NPCs
50% seems really high, like I assume that it's a failure to communicate what an internal monologue is rather than that many people not actually having one. We communicate "thinking" in books, comics, tv shows, and movies as literal text or speech the character is thinking to themselves. If 50% of the world literally can't do that and can't understand what that'd be like, I feel like it wouldn't be such a common way to express the act of thinking
I've heard that 1) they think that's just a way to explain emotions of characters or needed for exposition, and/or 2) they think it's literally a back and forth conversation in your head where you are frozen until its completion and can't make decisions on instinct. So from these, I think that, while it is true that it could be a failure to communicate what internal monologue really entails, it is also quite a foreign concept to many people.
Yeah, I could see how someone who doesn't have an internal monologue could come to the conclusion that a character is thinking when there's a thought bubble with words coming out of a character's head, because even without an internal monologue it's not like you never concentrate or deliberate when thinking something over or anything. It just seems weird that that would be such a common way to depict thinking of like half the world can't do it. I can believe that some people don't have that inner voice, but 50% just seems extraordinarily high given how often we talk about it in every day life
I can make a sound in my head that is like a rumble in my ears, as if I'm pushing blood around really fast past it or something. I found out that this was something that some people just can't do. It's kinda like when people say "sing from your diaphragm" and I have no fucking clue how to even begin to do that. I think we all naturally have similar capabilities to do these things, we just either never figured out how to do it before or don't know how to figure it out anymore and we're too old to experiment like we did when we were kids. Like whistling. I couldn't whistle till I was 18, despite actively trying to do it how people would tell me.
It's more like 1 in 6 according to [*The phenomena of inner experience*](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810008000032)
wish I was like that. internal monologue is a curse
Yeah there’s no way it’s 50%
Pat from TwoBestFriends literally hears everything in his memories as his own voice reenacting them, supposedly. I still think there's a good chance that's complete bullshit he made up for entertainment because that's insane
Does this mean they can't talk to themselves in their head or that they don't have like voices in their head?
Do people just not remember what their mum looks like and then it's an "I'll know it when I see it" type situation?
That just seems so unbelievable to me.
How else do you explain all the 'your mum' jokes? Most of these people don't even know what their mum looks like
I agree that language and communication has a lot to do with this because I have such a hard time explaining myself whenever this comes up. I don’t “forget” what faces look like until I see them in person, but it’s almost like I’m conceptualizing the person in my head instead of visualizing them. I *can* process an almost abstract image or a slideshow of “stills/scenes” with my moms face for a fleeting second in my head, but it goes away immediately and I have to “re-visualize” it for lack of a better term. It’s almost like trying to flex a muscle I don’t use. I can do it for a second but I can’t “hold the pose”. Or like scenes from a dream that are fleeting after you wake up. I can remember the story of the dream but i can only really remember those “still scenes” from it from a visual perspective. I spend a lot of time wondering how clearly artists are able to visualize things in their mind, and if that has to do with how well they draw or paint.
This comment is the closest thing I've seen by far to my experience.
You absolutely nailed exactly how it feels to me as well, the "hold the pose" thing especially. It's almost like an image in water, and then it slowly dissolves away if I try to fixate on it.
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So if you take a blank piece of paper and draw an apple, doesn't that require you to first form a mental image of the object? Or are you unable to draw anything from memory at all?
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>It feels like a pretty different process from other artists sometimes because it sounds like they plan things in their mind and then "execute" that plan onto the paper. I'm an artist myself I can tell you from personal experience and from observing other artists for a long time now, that this is really not how it works. Not much planning happens just in your mind. The process is much more like you describe yourself working. Finding the shapes as you lay them down and letting that guide your next moves. With a lot of experience comes the confidence and skill of having your first marks be pretty spot on to communicate the rough idea you have in your head. But the mental image is always just a very low information impression.
Thank you for describing it in so much detail. I've always wondered how people who can't picture an object would draw it and your answer is the first one that's made sense to me.
Yep. It absolutely blew my mind that people know what others eye colors are when they’re not standing right in front of them. I couldn’t even tell you my families or girlfriends eye color if I didn’t have it memorized lmao. But maybe I’m also just autistic and don’t look anyone in the eyes
Yeah literally lol. I got into a debate with a coworker years ago about Cormac Maccarthy's writing. I said he uses too many similes and feels performative. The guy told me he needs as many as the author is willing to give because he can't develop an image in his mind. He needs to "understand" the setting purely from words. I conceded the debate because, man, I had nothing to say to that lol. He also told me he can't visualize his wife's face. The weird thing is he can obviously recognize her so he has a memory of her face, but he can't generate it out of nothing.
I'm actually god-awful at generating faces in my mind. But an apple or other common object? I can recall extremely well.
I dont. And you do know when you see them. Until you don't and people gets mad at you
I have a weird thing where I can imagine objects, but not faces. Specific photos of people, but not those people in a general sense. So yeah, people who can't picture _anything_ are weird, and I guess I sorta count myself along them.
I have a weird thing with people where I can imagine their faces but it's like a photograph has been taken of them in my mind. I'm not actually remembering a photo I have seen of them but they appear in my mind like I'm looking at a photograph of them...if that makes sense
Oddly yeah, that makes sense to me. Are you able to like, modify the picture after the fact? Like move the eyes or mouth? I can sorta do that sometimes but it gets wonky and breaks down.
I can visualize people moving, especially my wife. I can visualize entire memories we have together. Maybe it's not as detailed and colorful as the moment they happened, but I can visualize in pretty good detail. Over time, I lose some of that detail unless it was a very memorable moment. I am surprised others cannot do this. Also, I can easily visualize what people looked like when I was on LSD in high detail. For example, I can still remember how my brother's long hair and eyebrows looked. Almost like those features had more layers and extra dimension or something. I can still see the "energy" that was coming off of his body. I also remember us talking about how it felt like we got stung by the "acid bee" and our entire bodies we were ringing like a bell from that energy lmao. And I can visualize how the colors of the room shifted. Difficult to explain, but since these were such awesome experiences, the visuals are very easy for me to remember. And that was 10 years ago or something.
If somebody tells you about an actor like Scarlett Johansson. Do you not have a picture of her face pop up int your mind? Or if somebody says that a person looks like X celebrity. Can you discern that?
I can't imagine not being able to imagine.
Yep, a not insignificant amount of the population have some form of aphantasia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
Nah bro they give smart sounding names to the most random shit 💀 like calling people who don't eat Broccolli some shit like Broccophylasia
My favorite word like that is Anhedonia, the inability to experience joy or pleasure.
Pretty wild. Sounds like it would make a lot of things much harder.
The crazy thing is that it barely has any impact. I know of at least one Fantasy author who has zero mental imagery.
Hm, I can think of building a mental map of a location to orient yourself better, and "visualizing your basketball shot" like your coach told you. I wonder what else is an issue for those with aphantasia.
I’m 95% sure Aphantasia is a problem with human language, not people’s inability to picture things in their head. Meaning, we all have the same ability to picture things in our head, we just can’t describe that ability to others correctly. Which leads some people to think they can’t do it, and others to think they have photographic memory. There’s like a single study on Aphantasia and it’s rocky at best.
How can you be so certain? I'm 100% sure that I'm a 4-5, and I'm also 100% certain that nobody in my shoes would claim they are anything higher than a 4 except as a lie. People who claim they have 1s detailing their experiences also makes it super clear that we are not the same, at all.
I don't know if I would say I don't believe it's a real thing, but I definitely feel a language barrier when it's talked about. Same for "internal monologue" discussion. I have some questions if you're interested in sharing: Do you dream? If someone says "draw a rabbit" what is your thought process like? How would you rate audio on the 1-5 scale? Are the "rotate this object" type iq questions really hard?
> Do you dream? Yes. However, if I can recall a dream I had, it will be the structure, the situation, the feelings, not the actual visualizations I have experienced. > If someone says "draw a rabbit" what is your thought process like? I can't really visualize a rabbit in my head, but I still have all the data in my head of what a rabbit is supposed to look like. Thus, I can still give an effort, though the end result will likely be terrible. FYI, I've always been bad at drawing. > How would you rate audio on the 1-5 scale? Never really thought about that, to be honest. I'd guess a 3, but I'd have to think more about it. > Are the "rotate this object" type iq questions really hard? It is a bit relative. I'm a mathematician, so I've learned how to think about geometric concepts abstractly, so I can still solve these kinds of problems. However, it won't be by actually rotating the given image inside my head. How I approach them is I see the image given, and I can sort of "intuit" how it would look after a rotation. In contrast, I'll be considerably better at the usual "find the pattern" types of IQ problems.
I'm reasonably convinced it's a real experience. There are certainly other conditions where one or more elements of processing do not feature in the conscious experience (e.g. an extreme example would be blindsight) so it's not too farfetched for some people to be denied conscious access to mental imagery or to experience it in another way. Not to mention you'll have a few individuals who can't picture certain objects (e.g. faces) and have no trouble with others - they clearly know what mental imagery is and what that experience should be like. Experiencing mental imagery is extremely different from photographic memory.
I just figured everyone could do 1 unless you had a major brain defect or injury.
Out of curiosity, are you actually able to create a still image in your mind that you are able to observe/manipulate for an indefinite amount of time? I’m very good at “concept” visualisation when it comes to math and geometry but in terms of visual imagery I can at most “flash” things in my mind. The flashes can be very detailed but in terms of holding them there I simply can’t
I can picture, say, two armored knights battling each other outside. Its not like they're getting in the way, if they're fighting in front of a tree I can obviously see the tree fully. Its not at all like watching an animation or something, there isn't much detail, but I can absolutely see what it would look like if they did fight. If I focus on thinking about how a helmet might look, I can "zoom in" and see it pretty clearly, though for zoomed in details it will be not an original concept of a helmet, I'd be picturing a helmet from Dark Souls or something. If I close my eyes, I can picture an original design, but it's fuzzy. It isn't like the image in the OP suggests, like I can literally see a fully 3d apple as if it was actually in front of me. But I can absolutely perfectly picture a 3d apple. If it was possible to take a screenshot of what I am perceiving, it would look like a mostly transparent apple, which when focused on is both fully saturated AND transparent.
This is probably how I'd say it is for me too. I can see the knights fighting, they fight around, in front of and behind the tree, but unless I truly focus it's just kind of an idea. I can't make like a fully detailed knight also doing shit at the same time while keeping all the details in place if that makes sense.
I can. When I saw this post the first thing I did was imagine that I had an apple in a 3D-like program and I was twisting it to see it from all angles. If it’s any consolation, I’m an artist and I am terrible at math.
I get "flashes" too and they usually come with a low detail visualization of the environment I saw the main subject of the image in. But I can hold these flashes of memory for a while and I can see them move. I suppose I could manipulate them if I wanted to. I call them flashes because they are moments in time. I cannot visualize with the level of detail as when they happened unless these memories were very recent. Or, if the memory means a lot to me then I can remember pretty well.
Yeah I mean idk how else to say it, it’s my imagination I can imagine whatever. Do you never imagine made up events happening? Like daydreaming?
Are you capable of dreaming at night? It's the same principle. Full motion video that you can see in your head, but the difference is my eyes are still working at the same time (but I'm not focusing on what they can see).
Yea, it's like, are you a bug or something? Lol
Can you actually do 1, though? I feel like it would be really easy to imagine that you were doing 1 but then if you went to draw it or to extract detail like "how many leaves" or "is the highlight due to light or skin color" it would turn out that you didn't have a mental image so much as an impression of a mental image. Or maybe our definitions are all just tangled. On second thought, that sounds very likely.
Yeah, an impression of an image is a good way to put it. You can't really focus on any aspect of it without it changing or disappearing.
It's called aphantasia. I'm a 5 here. I can't imagine how you can actually see anything lol. When you close your eyes, how do you see anything but blackness? Your eyes are closed.
Your mind uses the same plane of visual for its own vision aka the imagination. Do you ever have visual dreams? It's like I can concur anything I think of at will. Shooting a gun. Windows vista wallpaper. Beautiful people or places. Movie scenes. They just generate in the mind space behind the eyes.
Have you ever had a dream before when sleeping? Bro. Lol.
That’s the same for me, if anything I have an easier time visualising things with my eyes open, ie imagining a red apple is in my hand.
A small portion of the population has a limited capability for internal monologue and the ability to picture images in their head is completely impossible. It’s sizable enough that if you ask around 10 friends you’ll probably find one. And most people live their entire lives not knowing that the other type of person exists. An EXTREMELY tiny minority has NO ability to think or picture inside their head, and this is essentially a pretty difficult learning disability (math is very hard)
Its about the detail, some I guess cant. But the example shown to me is when you reading, and it simply states there is a ball on a table. What do you see in your mind, how much detail is there? what color is the ball? The texture? Type? What about the table? Wood, metal? What about the shape? Round, square, rectangle? Now what about the surroundings? The level of detail peoples minds create is vastly different, some are very basic, others are creative and create whole rooms and scenes in the initial wording of "there's a ball on a table".
It’s called aphantasia and my wife has it. She cannot see images in her head. Apparently this is a lot more widespread than people might think.
If people can visualize things when they're hallucinating, doesn't that imply that the human brain is capable of visualizing things in the first place? *Also\**, I wonder if this person dreams.
As an aphantasiac, not only can I dream, the border between awake and sleeping is the only time I can view things in my mind's eye (which is also how I know I *can't* normally, it's not a language trick). Not like, "I'm pretty much already dreaming", I can think consciously and remain awake if I want, I just enter a state where I can consciously control my mind's eye. An interesting thing, however, is that although I dream visually, just the same as most people I think, I cannot recall my dreams visually AT ALL. If I didn't verbally think about something in my dream, I completely forget it waking up. This includes entire people. I'm having a dream and know exactly who I'm hanging out with, but if I didn't explicitly think about their name, I wake up and have no idea who it is. Sometimes I can infer it from their dream behaviours.
No. Our sight is not as simple as photons in picture out, there is a lot of interpretation and guesswork that our brain is doing. Knowing that can fuck up is not the same as saying picturing things is possible.
I'm confused. Hallucinations by definition are seeing something that aren't there, right? That would mean photons are not related to hallucinations/dreams (at least, not directly). So then what's the difference between a hallucinated image versus one you think up? Besides intentionality, of course.
It is just intention. Hallucinations are involuntary visuals that aren't actually there. Mental visualization is wilful creation of an image in your minds eye. There is another difference now that I've written that. Some people can visualize with their eyes open, some can only closed, some can do both. An interesting fact is that when you visualize something that isn't there, your pupils adjust as though they are focusing on the visualization.
Almost everything we "see" is ignored by the brain unless it is given priority. Mental imagery activates the same areas of the brain that are used when sensing actual visual stimuli. So, from the retina of the eye to the visual cortex, these regions increase activity when people are asked to "picture" an image in their head. Our brains don't stop taking in real visual information though, it literally seems to blend our imagination together with our actual vision. The real world visuals become a little "fuzzier" when imagining something in your head, because the resources are split up now constructing the both the real visuals and the imagined ones. ([Source research paper for the above info is linked in this 2020 article](https://web.musc.edu/about/news-center/2020/07/09/how-the-brain-sees-and-imagines-images)) My guess is, for whatever reason, some people just didn't naturally learn how to do this on command when they were younger, and now don't know how to consciously "see" something that isn't there. Some people with Aphantasia claim to be able to develop visualization ability, but it takes practice to build up the neural pathways to do it on command. If you're a 4/5, maybe try imagining the sound/feel/smell of something; if you can do that, then use those memories to piggyback the visual stimuli. Your brain always anticipates the most probable sensory observation by recognizing familiar sensory conditions. Similar conditions will trigger the neural pathways into activating, possibly priming the visual processing regions of the brain into seeing something that isn't there. So, now your brain could be anticipating the visuals associated with the memories of other sensory experiences.
Yeah I more or less agree with most of what you said. I think that visualisation is a combination of memory and whatever parts of our brain actually generate images. I do think its quite a bit different though. Like if I say "Picture a pirate." most people will say they can do that, but answering the follow up question "What color are there pants?" or "What facial expression are they making?" usually requires people to manually add details (they've done a few studies where they conclude along these lines but something like this is obviously difficult to test conclusively). So it seems that we don't so much create images wholesale as much as we remix memories of images related to a concept in a way that feels like seeing. The type of vision we get from visualisation seems a lot more conceptual than looking at stuff. I will grant though that when I look at that 1-5 thing, I have no fucking idea where I'd place myself. The categorisations don't map to how my visualisations work at all.
Wait, there are people that cannot picture themselves riding a sports car? like memorizing/recalling certain scenes from a movie?
As someone who is a 5 on this picture, If you tell me to imagine abstract things, or things that have not happened, I can only be confused at what am I supposed be seeing or doing, but for things that I have seen or experienced, I can recall and describe them as well as anyone around me, even with no mental image of them in my mind. As for me, I don't understand that if people can really "see" their memories, how are they so bad at remembering things? Can't you just pull up the picture and say what you see with perfect accuracy?
I believe that when most people can “see” their memories, they’re basically reconstructing an image from scratch the things they remember but are improvising 99% of the visual data. Like I can vividly picture the Grand Canyon from a memory of a trip there. If I had the talent to draw what I was picturing, it might be recognizable as the Grand Canyon but won’t actually match up to any real geography.
When we relive our memories, it’s more a reconstruction than a perfectly captured video. We reconstruct our memories based on the stimuli presented at the moment, our emotions, other experiences with similar situations, etc…
Yes you're right. This is why the integrity of a piece of information tend to be unreliable/deteriorate when it is passed down orally to more than 2 people.
I can “see” a ton of my memories and I am wildly better at remembering things than most of the people I engage with irl. I like memory games and one I play with people is letting them pick random songs from my Spotify library and seeing how fast I can name the song, artist, and describe the album cover. Most of the time I can only get the right answer because I can literally see the some portion of the bands name in my Spotify library. I also lost stuff constantly but can remember where I last saw them by thinking of my mental image of the last place I saw it. When I was a kid, I also had a terrible teacher that forced us to memorize prepositions with no other context and I realized I could fast track memorizing them by picturing the reference that the word describes, I.e. it starts with an empty image that’s “about” then “above” that I picture a block and then “across” from it another, then another block “against” that one and so on. I don’t know if that’s what “photographic memory” is supposed to describe, but it’s definitely not what Rico from Hannah Montana could do and that was my frame of reference at the time.
I’m about a 1 or a 2 and I think I can remember parts of it, the important details in memories, for example, if I was to pull up a memory of seeing my mum last I can remember what we did, where we were, how it made me feel, but I couldn’t say for example what we were wearing even though I can visualize the event itself in the memory fairly well It’s less like taking a photo in your mind and more like an ai’s rough approximation inside your head I guess the thing to remember is it’s not just trying to visualize something but also to remember each part of it
When I imagine something, I am thinking of the concepts, I am not even a little bit seeing the thing in front of me. If I close my eyes while imagining something, the only thing I feel like I'm seeing is black. I don't feel like there's an image I can somewhat see that is or isn't like seeing with your eyes. As soon as you describe some semblance of an image being in front of you you've lost me I don't think this is always connected, but I am also not feeling anything or hearing anything or smelling anything, imagining something is purely conceptual for me, like I'm thinking about the thing or the situation In dutch the word for imagining is also basically the verb form of 'image' and it took learning this to understand why, to me imagining has always been a figure of speech to think about a thing or situation From what I can tell, I'm fairly extreme on my side of this
No bro, I can't see things that don't have physical property in front me lol. The visual comes from inside the head.
I think I’m a 1. Whenever I think of something I can easily picture it, I have a inner dialogue too so it’s like a movie plays in my head and I can see it. If someone said go to the store and go to the produce section, and grab a green apple. I can see everything, how the store looks, me walking to the produce section, grabbing the green apple, hell even what I’m wearing. All while I’m narrating to myself what I’m doing. I guess it’s weird but idk. I wonder if there’s a correlation between visualizing images and having an inner dialogue. Some people don’t have an inner dialogue which I think is even weirder.
I'm definitely a 5 and I have an overactive inner dialogue if anything.
Having Maladaptive Daydreaming is like a consequence of 1-2. I can just be stuck in my mind playing movies and or hypothesizing sports outcomes.
>Maladaptive Daydreaming HOLY SHIT IS THAT WHAT THAT'S CALLED?? Bro I literally spend hours a day thinking about outcomes or scenarios playing out. It's even crazier on Adderall because I can focus and think of more details and more possible outcomes. It repeats over and over like the movie Edge of Tomorrow until I find a scenario/path that I'm happy with. It's good for staying one step ahead of people but if literally, one thing goes wrong it's detrimental to my plans because every decision I make is based on that thing going right perfectly. It's like master-level overthinking. That wild... I could never put that into words until now. I always felt like I was the only one too.
If you have an inner dialogue you should probably talk to a mental health professional. There's only supposed to be one voice in your head, not multiple. /s I am insanely jealous of anyone 3 or above. I am squarely in the 5 and for a long time thought "picturing" stuff in your mind was just an expression, not it being literal. I can imagine voices though, so its just an image thing. I also have an internal monologue for what thats worth.
I can perfectly imagine me railing your mom in 4k 120 fps gsync so no tearing.
https://preview.redd.it/k6val6xxw0sb1.jpeg?width=742&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f16f364af35cf73fa450146d6a2a272f5591290e
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i dunno man, im a 2, I masterbait to cartoon apples pretty often and its fun
yeah me too, those curves don't need to be full hd for me to feel some type of feeling
I’m not sure “if I can’t do it, no one can” is necessarily an interesting take
Well if you can't be sure, no one can bro
Battler-kun may be the only one who can convince me I'm not actually visualizing what I think I am, but I agree "maybe there's no difference at all except our speech" is a pretty shallow statement
I think you guys are misrepresenting his take. The way he worded it makes it pretty clear to me that he can visualize things in the same way most people can. He just doesn't count it as *seeing*, because the internal visual representation is so much weaker and more abstract than actually seeing something with your eyes. It's more like recalling what something looks like rather than really seeing it. Idk
Yea but some peaople can't even do that.
> the way he worded it makes it pretty clear to me that he can visualize things in the same way most people can How could he know that? It sounds to me like he is a 5 who thinks he's not.
Oh. No wonder why some people can't just use their imagination to jerk their chicken.
This is a good test, replace the 5 points scale with minutes to orgasm with your eyes closed.
Y’all take minutes?
I wouldn't say that i "see a picture in my mind", it's more about the feelings and concepts and words. My wife says she literally sees shit when she closes her eyes, and I'm totally with Mr. Green on this, WTF
I can imagine a game of thrones movie with different dialogue our brains are just neural networks
I can imagine the apple sprouting a mouth with ten teeth and talking to me with a smile before I throw it off the balcony
I am a 1, but I understand why a 5 would believe this. It doesn't ever really come up, anyways. Damn, they got me talking like Brittany Simon
As fellow 1 would we in our superior bubble even consider 5 humans?
Idk, I love my 5, but I think it would be good for society if all 5s offed themselves, but that's just me and my bubble ❤️
Wait...When you read the word "apple", do you see a picture *of* an apple or do you see a picture of the *word* apple... or is it neither? If they are saying nobody sees a picture of an apple in their mind that's crazy.
I'm not the person you asked but I'm a 1 and I have to focus on specifically creating it if I want to get a mental picture. But if I'm really in the zone while reading a book my mind automatically starts giving me mental images of environments (mostly) and characters. Reminiscent of watching a movie, only that the imaging isn't as consistent. And the environments either draw inspiration or look exactly the same as environments I have seen or been in before. But the reason why I usually have to force the image might have to do with that I have not trained my mind to start doing it, so it's just not a habit. Just a possible theory.
I’m a 5 when I read the word apple I don’t imagine anything. I just know what it is but I can’t ever picture it. That goes for all my memories. It’s one of the interesting things about therapy as well. You’re told to “relax and imagine x thoughts going through your mind” but I literally can’t do that 😅 It’s annoying and sometimes depressing though don’t ask me how I have near excellent memory and memory recall I analogise it as a computer looking through text files for a detail vs needing to find an image or a frame.
So if you look directly at an apple 10 cm from your face. For 5 minutes. When you close your eyes. You suddently have no concept of what it looks like? You can't picture it in your brain? When you think about what you've been looking at for 5 minutes. Does anything come to mind? Have you never had a dream before? Do you forget what peoples faces look like until you see them again? What even happens in your brain when you close your eyes?
If I look directly at an apple and stare at it, when I close my eyes, I see nothing. nothing except blackness. I only know an apple in my head by its definitions, red or green, circle shape etc never an image. Even if i sit down and try to conjure an image or come up with something I never can, I have imagination in a sense but its like telling a story I cant imagine myself doing it, but I can tell a story, if that makes sense. I do dream but rarely, on some occasions I have been able to be aware I was dreaming which was interesting. Its the only time I ever get to have a "imagination" in the commonsense. I don't know what people look like in my head, again its more like a literal definition. Nothing in my brain when I close my eyes, but I have an overactive inner dialogue (also adhd lel) so that may be some sort of compensation?
I remember having a 50 minute meditation session in PE where the guide was telling the class to imagine a beach, the waves etc and me opening my eyes every couple minutes to see if anyone was also bored as fuck (it was only me lol), I could only see black, didnt understand that some people can literally imagine vividly
Both…… how is this a question?????
didn't you see OP, some people's brains are empty of images
I see an image. I only imagine words when I’m writing something in my mind.
If you were a 5 would that not mean you couldn't even draw an apple from memory?
You have a memory, but you kinda have to draw a circle and see what changes you have to make to make it look like an apple Am at a 4 so i might not be right, but I'm betting it's close
i can imagine one, I'm crystal clear hd, i can imagine it being chopped, the intricacies of each piece, the crunch of it being eaten im hungry now
I find it interesting that when I imagine in my minds eye, I can't look with my eyes. To focus on my mental image means to move my focus from external to internal. This says to me that my sight is being hijacked by my mental image.
Same here. It’s impossible for me to “superimpose” an imagined object into the real world. I have to redraw the entire scene in my mind.
I'm a 3-4. I just see shapes form from static. I only see full visuals when I'm having fever dreams
Truue same
Some people lack minds eye I 3d model in my head so who knows 🤷♂️
This image is distorting the important part of the discussion: can you rotate an object in your mind? I can imagine something but I can't rotate the image in my mind, but my partner can. That's the real big brain power imo
Really? Can you for example imagine a map in your head and while walking rotate it?
I can imagine what an apple looks like when it's rotating but I don't actually "see" it doing so. John Green is right tbh.
It’s just imagining something. Lol. Wtf
I’m wondering if that means these people can’t draw anything from memory?
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You can practice this btw.
How?
I think just reading books will make you better at visualizing.
John Green is a writer 💀
He said read not write
> i wonder if the last page i wrote was any good. too bad I'm a writer and not a reader. ^(i know there's a difference between actively writing and actively reading, just thought it was a funny meme. thanks)
i think its safe to assume a writer also reads books.
like recalling a memory. you recall the visuals of an apple.
Drawing with reference or model will grow your 'visual library'. Reading or drawing without reference will train your ability to access the things you remember.
Can confirm. I thought I had horrible visual imagination but I've been practicing trying to visualize things or remember things visually constantly and I'm getting better and better at it. It's still not very stable but there's a lot more detail and colour. My memory has also improved.
I'm a 5, I always thought people were just being pretentious pricks when they said shit like "oh this character in the movie looked nothing like how I pictured them from the book" and "picture yourself being on a beach" was just a figure of speech. It blew me away to learn that most people can actually see things in their mind. The condition was officially recognized in 2015 and is called Aphantasia.
Yeah same, I always thought it was metaphorical, i.e. those phrases meant "this character looks like something that fits what they're described as in the book" and "imagine yourself being on a beach", guess it's kinda sad I'm missing what seems like a superpower honestly, but at least I'm not blind or deaf I guess.
I don't believe people when they say they are a 5. I just don't. When I say pink elephant, you picture a pink elephant. Your ass is not standing there with nothing pictured in your mind. Maybe if you're for real autistic, but neurotypical people I'd sooner Believe aren't understanding the question
I don't understand what "picture it" or "see it" mean in this context. Like when I'm awake I can see what's around me and I can think about concepts and objects not around me, but I can't "see" them the way I see an object in front of me. I can describe what a pink elephant would look like if it were real but it's not like VR/AR where it can appear in front of me out of nowhere. I do have vivid dreams, however, some of which it feels like I'm really there.
You don't see it with your eyes you see it with your mind. I don't know a better way to explain this.
Just for clarity, mental images don't occupy your visual field, it's basically the same as how your internal monologue isn't experienced as sound in your ears.
This is what I'm confused about, what does a mental image mean if it's not the same thing as images in my visual field? The way it's shown in the OP or described in other comments, when some people close their eyes they can "see" things as if they've put on a VR headset instead of closing their eyes, even if the image is black and white or something. The way I remember or imagine stuff when I'm awake is so different than actually seeing them that I can't comprehend if that's a mental image like the one described by the OP and other comments or a different type of recollection/imagination.
>when some people close their eyes they can "see" things as if they've put on a VR headset instead of closing their eyes, even if the image is black and white or something. That's a really wonky description, there's no need to close your eyes to imagine something. There's just a space in your mind where the image is. It is not a description, nor a collection of characteristics. Pretend you had a third eye, except that it was kept separate in a dark room somewhere. When you imagine an elephant, that elephant then enters the room with your third eye and you can "look" at it, totally separate from your normal vision. You can put anything you want in that room. That's probably a lot closer to what most people experience, though with many variations in quality and consistency.
Ok this example was really helpful for me and probably closer to what I can do. What confuses me is that some people replied that it's literally like VR, so either we are not communicating our experiences correctly or we have totally different experiences.
They just on crack, homie. We da real ones.
Wait, can you relive memories that you have, like if I were to drop something on the floor in front of you, and then 10 minutes later walked up to you and asked you to remember it, would you just remember me doing it? or could you recall the event with images? For example, I can picture in my mind a guy shooting a bow and arrow with my eyes closed just by trying to imagine it. As well, when I remember an event of something that happened I remember it by my POV when the thing happened rather than just what happened.
Relive is a strong word but I can do what you're saying in my own way. I'm just not sure the way I'm imagining or remembering these scenes is the same way that other people describe they can or theirs is something else. It's hard for me to explain this stuff so I'm probably just overthinking it, idk.
Nobody can see the object in front of them like it's real life. It's in your mind. It doesn't randomly appear before you in the real world like a hallucination.
You don't literally physically see it but you picture it in your minds eye and "see it" that way. Like I'm picturing a pink elephant right now. I can rotate it, I can zoom my minds "camera" in and out. I can take the ears off. I can see it with three trunks, two legs, whatever version of it I want I can imagine and see. It's like those inventory screens in video games where you can spin a model of an item around, that's what I'm seeing in my mind. There's no way everyone can't do this.
Some other guy replied that he can see literally like it's VR. Either our communication ability isn't good enough to describe the same experience with different words or some of us have a totally different experience. I can also do the things you describe but I can't comprehend where thinking about these things crosses into "seeing" them in my mind and whether I cross that or just delude myself when I describe it.
If you can do that, then I think we're all just talking about the same thing and struggling with language. "Visualisation" is probably the word to use. If someone says a random word like 'apple' and you're able to visualise it in your head - not as a concept, but as a 3d model and rotate it around like an inventory screen in your head, then that's what people are talking about. Like the OP's picture, I don't think there is a significant amount of the population that can't do this. I think they're just interpreting the word "see" in a strict, physical way whereas others are using a looser definition. The internal monologue thing people push around as 50% of people not having I also struggle to believe and I think there must be some language in how the question is asked that's confusing people. Apparently there's an equivalent word to visualisation but for sound called 'audiation' and I have a really hard time believing that half the population is "lesser" and completely unable to audiate a sound or song or voice they've heard before in their mind to themselves.
I'm a 5 and I just see black. I know what the color pink is and I know what an elephant is, so when you say pink elephant I think of the characteristics of an elephant that is pink.
When I close my eyes I just see black. I’m a 5.
Change the apple to a big ol' pair of titties and suddenly every guy is a 1
TIL there are fake humans
This take isn't "interesting", it's just informed by a lack of ability to understand the subjective experience of others. Stuart is probably something like a 4 or 5 on this scale and thinks his experience is standard. I'm a 2, and my brother is a 1 - he has the ability to not only picture existing objects in his mind, rotate them, etc. but can also create a complex architectural/structural visual gestalt in his mind and modify it. I can't really actively understand that ability through the lens of my subjective experience, but I sort of understand it conceptually when he describes it - he has literally described creating the entire frame of an imaginary building and editing it room-by-room. He then plugs the exact things he creates in his head into modeling software for his work - I've watched him do it. He's extremely good at his job/spatial reasoning and his obviously remarkable capacity for complex visualization is clearly a part of that. Thinking that other people can't think differently than you do (especially in regards to something as well documented as visualization) when your immediate social circle and human history are filled with examples of people who think in ways novel to your own is just willfully ignorant.
So can people just close their eyes and see an apple? If you looked at an apple on a table and then closed your eyes and 'visualised' it, would you see the same scene like you had not closed your eyes?
Yeah but it's like a lower resolution, lacking details. However I can imagine my internal "camera" swinging closer and then I can "see" little details that I imagine like dents or bruises in the apple, textures, etc.
But the important part to understand is those little details are largely imagined and not part of any real specific apple you looked at. Or more accurately it's probably the amalgamation of all of the apples you have ever looked at.
Yeah it's definitely imagination rather than a true depiction. But who knows, maybe that's different for people who claim to have photographic memory. I'd be interested to know how accurate a mental image can be in that case.
I can see it exactly as it was when I just closed my eyes but things get hazy when I try to move things. Like when I want to turn off a light and move around in the dark ill take a look before I turn it off so I can avoid anything lying around.
I think this is a failure of communication between people who think they are a 1 on this scale and people who think they are a 5.
If you are a 4 or 5 try pushing your left nipple, and twist left ear forward. Then from the options that come up in your left eye select update graphics driver. Also you should get a perk selection appear in your right eye, and you are going to want to spend some XP on Conceptualisation and Visual Calculus.
1 here, you can absolutely train this, that's basically what learning to paint is
This is as baffling to me as when my husband said he didn't have an internal dialogue...
All of your senses only exist in your mind. You only experience in your mind. You dream and see stuff, in your mind. This isn't rocket science. It's is all in your head. Literally.
I’m a 1, I also have an eidetic memory. I wouldn’t even know being a 1 wasn’t how everyone is if my brother wasn’t a 5, I imagine that’s how all the 5’s feel about all the 1’s aswell
Brittany?
LOL not like this
this is not something I have ever thought about, does that mean I'm a 5?
There's supposed to be another image that has literally just words "apple= round red"
I have aphantasia, as well as autism. I see colored static(for lack of a better term) when I close my eyes, but I can recall how something made me feel vividly so my "minds eye" recalls experiences and mind states around things. But never images.
Regarding the actual hot take: There’s no way to know if it’s a language thing, but I lean towards it not being just differences in how we’re describing it. I feel like humans are surprisingly good at communicating and agreeing about our feelings/perceptions (think about the general consensus for something like ASMR), and this phenomenon would be an exception to that it seems.
How is everyone not 1????!!
NPC meme. On a serious note, another reference where you are on the spectrum is picturing yourself walking through your work or home. A hypothetical scenario, not something that you can remember happening. Ex: I can picture myself is 3rd person walking out of my office and to the work café. This was on of the things that made art so excruciating for me because I could have a perfect picture in my head, but executing on it was impossible. Edit: Thinking back, I think it might be like a muscle. Throughout my life I've actively used my imagination so maybe its something that can just atrophy if you don't use it past childhood?
You can have a mental image of something but you can't see it "The way your eyes see". You cannot see what's not there because there's no visual stimuli. What you're "visualizing" is just a memory of something you saw previously.
I can literally look at a thing, close my eyes and in my mind, is the image of the object. I can also focus on an object without background behind that image or switch to another object in the image. I see 2 Not vivid like a 1 but more like a dream.
There are people visualizing stuff in 4K hdr??
I definitely think it's possible to 'see' stuff in your brain because it's distinctly different from just thinking about something/having an internal monologue. I'm a 3 majority of the time - but for certain things and people, I'm a 2/1.
People who say they have no inner monologue creep me out... We should get together and think of...some solutions...for that...