Mental Imagery and Aphantasia.

[Mr Quixotic]

Hi all,

Ever since I can recall, I've lacked the ability to generate or maintain an image in my mind. Up until a few years ago, I thought those who said they 'could see things in their head' were speaking metaphorically, and that they didn't actually see real images as if they were watching a movie or looking at a picture. Then, I discovered they actually could, and trying to comprehend how that works, to me, is like attempting to interpreting a foreign language.

It's only recently that Scientist's have discovered that not all people have a 'working mind's eye' - up until then it was assumed  everyone did -, and that any research has been undertaken. A couple of months ago, it was given a name, "Aphantasia."

Aphantasia - The Conversation article

I'm intrigued to as to how common, or rare this is. And to know how much those who do possess a functioning mind's eye rely on mental imagery, and/or if it's just something which is taken for granted, and not really thought about.

Edit: 09/18/19 to replace outdated link

[TaintedAndDelish]

Interesting, though some of this is based on self reporting and some hinges on verbal communication. The phrase "conjure an image of x in your mind" could mean different things to different people. One person might say "no" because they cannot command a "photographic" image to their mind while another might say "yes" if their mind is briefly visited by a distorted, vague image that might seem more like a memory than a persistent, visual image that they can look at and examine without it changing on them.

I've often wondered myself what people really mean when they say they are "seeing" something in their mind - if they are talking about a memory, an image that's as clear as sight, or something somewhere in between or perhaps slightly different.

[Mr Quixotic]

That's true, when I did some google-ing on it, well before I came across the article I linked, people all described their own experiences in different ways. I think there's probably a large spectrum.

I'm the same, it's difficult to know exactly what people mean, or what they see. When it comes to me, 'nothingness' is the best way that I can describe it. No shapes, vague images or impressions, just gray.

[Starbunny]

My own personal experience of visualization is usually best described as translucent outlines, which at times can be frustrating but it's also something I use when creating visual art. I have also discovered that regular yoga actually dramatically enhances my ability to visualize and makes the imagery crisper, clearer and more stable. It may not work for everyone but it might be worth experimenting with if you're a curious person!

[AmberStarfire]

This is an older thread now but I want to reply here anyway. I think there is a spectrum and some people think visually more than others. It raises the question too of whether some people tend toward visual thinking more as they develop visualisation skills or whether they think throughout their lives in much the same way. It feels to me that I think in concepts, emotions, or visually, and not really in words except for when I'm trying to word something. Thoughts that get to the heart of the meaning happen more quickly and easily than words.

When I think visually, I usually get a hazy 2 or 3 dimensional diagram or image, or sometimes a video. For instance, I can visualise a house with grass on the ground outside of it, trees around it (green and golden brown, like the colours of autumn), fences, and walk through the yard toward the house, and into the house, and my mind fills in the blanks as I go if I will it to. But it's more hazy with occasional flashes of clarity, than persistent. I can leave the thought, return to the thought, etc. I can also think of the concept of a horse and wait for my mind to give me a flash of one, and it might be vague, and I tell myself that's not good enough, and it might give me a picture of a horse almost like a photograph.. only of a photograph I don't recall ever seeing before, and then it's gone. But recalling a visual image of a horse I saw sometime ago isn't something I can easily do.

I think if you don't think visually then your mind compensates by thinking in other ways that serve your needs.

[Jojomo]

You know what this makes me think about?  Friends or associates who tell me music doesn't move them.  At least, not in the same way that I have seen it move the masses.  They do not actively search out music, but will accept it (So to speak) if it's playing around their place of being.  They hear things in a different way even, it seems.  It's not about the various components of the music.  It's not about say...the lyrics.  It's about the entire body of the music.  I'd say though that there's all kinds in this world.  I'm glad that things are (Well facts/science/research) there to help.  You know, make you feel more of a part of things.  That you're not so crazy after all, for being of a different form.  Not that that's the truth, but lies can alienate others easily.

[Aethereal]

       I can visualize things in my mind with relative ease, have always been able to do so, and even more so since I started drawing and later roleplaying (I see all my roleplayed scenes as if a floating camera would, for the lack of a better description)... It's not all that different from your regular sight, or perhaps seeing anything in your dream. When conjuring an image while awake, I actually "see" both the real scenario and my mental image, but am only paying attention to one at a time. I can do the same with auditory input (so "hear" speech or music in my head), and (with a smidgen of more difficulty) even touch or taste.
       It actually took me some time to realize not all people can do that.

       As far as thinking goes - I actually think in none of those things (so mental visualization only happens when I consciously want to give something form, and I only hear/think in words when I'm actively trying to formulate my thoughts into something other people would comprehend). I'm overwhelmingly an abstract thinker.

[HannibalBarca]

I think this whole new field of study is just grazing the surface.  After all, images are images, based on vision--just one of our senses.  I've always had an active imagination, but...my imagination is so much more vivid and creative if I am listening to music while creating.  Making it a multimedia experience, so to speak.  I'm sure that, just like gender, autism, and so many other things, there is a spectrum to our experiences of visualization.

[Mr Quixotic]

Having just returned from a long hiatus, this is the first chance I've had to read the responses, to thanks to everyone for their comments.

Not long after I posted the original topic, subsequent to the condition being scientifically named, a website was created for those with Aphantasia   It's interesting to read everyone's different experiences, where they sit on the spectrum, and how many say it's affected their personal lives, which I can't say it has for me. The brain re-wires itself, and finds ways to compensate

I think it will generate further study, and what I'd be curious to discover is if it's what leads to visual aesthetics being relatively unimportant to me in any aspect of my life, and in turn, if that correlates to the reasons for some of my other preferences, such as considering myself sapio-sexual, and my attraction to in my own writing (including my intuitive style)  and all other fictional medium, stories which are more character internal driven and based than world-building, or those which rely on or contain a lot of imagery.   

[DrFier]

I'm actually quite surprised that this is a thing.  I figured there was somewhat of a spectrum, but I didn't think not being able to conjure images at all was really a possibility.  I do relate a lot to what Aethereal said in this regard,  where like dreaming you can see both the real world and the "dream" world, the real world being much stronger while awake than while sleeping. 
Phantasia is a skill I purposely chose to hold on to, even since my childhood.  I always assumed the ability to conjure full scale hallucinations (for lack of a better word) with images, sounds textures and smells was likely a rare phenomenon, but figured everyone could do it to a certain extent.  I don't actually comprehend how memory can function without being able to recall sensations in the mind.
Something I find mildly strange is that it is actually more difficult to conjure a hallucination on top of reality than it is to create an entirely new plane of existence.  Hallucinations have more of an ethereal feel to them, almost as if they exist not in reality but a copy of reality superimposed onto real reality.  The 4D images imposed on reality contrast heavily with fully conjured worlds, which appear with the standard 6D clarity of a memory, seen alongside reality, even though I have never experienced them exactly as I see them before.
Aethereal speaks of his realms being viewed by a floating camera.  This seems to be the more default view for me as well, but it is not the only one possible.  Inhabiting a character or creature is trivial, even if it does have to be done manually.  Essentially, I find the abilities of visualization to be nearly identical to lucid dreaming, with the exception that lucid dreaming places you in a space where the dream world is much stronger, and reality is not nearly as strong, so any effect you want to create would be much simpler.  Unfortunately I find that your creativity is somewhat bounded here, as creating something of too great a complexity will cause you to awaken.

I have long wondered if the level of my ability was unique, but I never imagined that the ability itself wasn't available to everyone.

[Florence]

Huh, I just saw this, and it got me thinking that I'm not really sure how well I can 'visualize' something, because I can't really see someone else's visualization to compare perceptions.

If other people are able to perceive imagined visual imagery exactly the same as they perceive real visual stimuli, that's not something I think I've ever been able to do, except maybe when I'm dreaming.

Still, I can imagine things, images even, and I can recall what things look like, but it's... a distinctly different experience from visually perceiving them.

[Mr Quixotic]

Although it's been a while since the last response, this thread still seems to be getting some views and rather than create a brand-new thread I thought I'd add an update to this one for anyone else who is aphantasic or has an interest in the subject.

The past couple of years has brought increased research into the subject and the below sumarises some of the studies done. As one of the leading Professors conducting the research is Australian and doing the work at the University of NSW (a couple of hours away from me) I'm hopeful that in the next year or so I can take part in some 'in-person' neurological and brain-scan experiments/research.

Online and In-person Experiment Update

Online experiments: First we would like to thank you all for participating in our online research last year and your very helpful feedback! We are currently writing these studies up for publication and we will share these with you when they come to fruition. We will also be sending out two new online studies in the next few weeks for you to participate in if you would like too. After feedback from participants regarding incompatibility with Inquisit we specifically developed one of these studies so that it does not use Inquisit to ensure that everyone should be able to participate in this experiment.

In person experiments: Due to COVID19 we were unable to do any in person testing at the UNSW lab during 2020 however with the vaccine rolling out in Australia we hope to begin shortly, and we are just in the process of getting our ethics approved with COVID19 procedures in places. We will be contacting people in the next few months regarding these new studies. If you are based in Sydney and have not previously participated in our studies and would like to be notified of the new studies occurring, please send an email with the headline “Sydney Based Aphantasia Participant” to aphantasia@pearsonlab.org.

Dr Rebecca Keogh has recently been awarded a research fellowship at Macquarie University in North Ryde (Sydney) where she will continue her work on aphantasia in conjunction with Prof. Pearson. She will also be running some new experiments at Macquarie university over the next few years using magnetoencephalography (MEG) which is a non-invasive brain imaging tool which measures brain activity to provide us with more information regarding the brain and aphantasia. She will be contacted people who are interested in participating in this research in the coming year.


New Aphantasia Papers

There have been 4 new papers published on aphantasia in the last year, two from our group, one from Assistant Prof. Bainbridge and colleagues and one from Prof. Zeman’s group in the UK. We’ll give a quick summary of these papers below, if you would like a copy of any of these papers you can emails us or the authors of the papers.

Our new study “The Critical Role of Mental Imagery in Human Emotion: Insights from fear-based imagery and aphantasia” published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B used physiological measures to assess the role visual imagery plays in fearful imagery.

In this study we had two groups of participants (one group who experience visual imagery and one group of aphantasic individuals) read scary stories while we measured their skin conductance (basically this indexes how much you sweat!). The idea being that when we experience something that is emotionally arousing, we sweat more (and thus you get an increase in skin conductance). We found that when participants with visual imagery read these scary stories there was an increase in their skin conductance, however there was no such increase in aphantasic individuals. We also ran control study where participants looked at scary images (for example snakes) and found that both groups of individuals showed similar increases in skin conductance when seeing scary images, providing evidence that these differences in emotional responses are specific to imagined content.

Together these findings suggest that visual imagery makes reading fearful stories more scary, probably due to visual imagery being like a weak form of seeing. Future studies should assess whether these findings also hold for different emotions or more personally We think this work also provides a potential new objective tool which could be used to diagnose aphantasia in the future!

Our new study “Attention driven phantom vision: measuring the sensory strength of attentional templates and their relation to visual mental imagery and aphantasia” published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society assessed feature-based attentions relationship to visual imagery.

Feature based attention is used when we search for an object in a display, for example when we are looking for our blue pen on a cluttered desk. There is a theory that when we search for the pen some people create ‘attention templates’ of the image in their minds which they use when they search for the image (although not all people do this). These attention templates sound very much like visual imagery so we were interested to see if aphantasic individuals could create attention templates. We found that while aphantasic individuals could attend to a colour when it was presented on the screen, there was no evidence that they could create attention templates. We also found that in people with visual imagery their imagery strength correlated with the strength of their attention templates.

These results suggest that aphantasic individual’s likely use a different cognitive strategy to creating attention templates to perform visual search tasks and we hope to conduct some research to follow up these findings in a new study.

In their unique study “Quantifying aphantasia through drawing: Those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory” published in Cortex Bainbridge and colleagues used an innovative objective measure to investigate an interesting finding that both Adam Zeman and our lab have found; that aphantasic individuals report reduced object visual imagery (e.g., imaging the colour and texture of a brown leather couch) but not necessarily spatial imagery (e.g., where in space the couch might be). In this study they had two groups of individuals (participants with visual imagery and aphantasic individuals) and they showed participants images of room scenes and asked them to remember them. They were then later asked to draw the image from memory as well as performing a recognition task where they were presented with images of scenes and asked to indicate if they had seen the image before. 

There were no differences in performance between the groups of the recognition test however there were some interesting differences in the memory drawing for the participants. The unique thing about using these drawings to test memory is that memory for the objects and spatial locations of objects could be separated somewhat and the authors found that, in line with the previous self-reported retained spatial imagery, aphantasic individuals did not draw as many object details from memory but there was no difference in the drawing of spatial details when compared to individuals who experience visual imagery.

This study “What is the relationship between Aphantasia, Synaesthesia and Autism?” from Prof. Zeman’s group, published in Consciousness and Cognition, aimed to assess the relationship between aphantasia and synaesthesia. Synaesthesia is a condition where one sense elicits another sensation that is not physically present. For example one of the most common synaesthetic forms is grapheme-colour synaesthesia where individuals associate specific numbers and letters with a specific colour. This is the form of synaesthesia that is investigated here.

Here the authors ran 2 large studies where they surprisingly found that there were no significant differences in the percentage of synaesthetes in the aphantasic/low-imagers group (scores of 1 or 2 on a imagery questionnaires) when compared to those individuals with visual imagery.

The nature of synaesthesia does differ from person to person, and this may help explain the surprising results. Synaesthesia has been proposed to be comprised of two different types of synaesthetes: projectors and associators. Projectors report that they see the associated colour in space for example they may say “When I look at a certain letter/number, the synesthetic colour appears somewhere outside my head (such as on the paper)”, whereas associators do not report seeing the colour out in space and might describe their experience thusly “When I look at a certain letter/number, the accompanying colour appears only in my thoughts and not somewhere outside my head (such as on the paper)”. Due to this the authors of the paper looked into these different types of synaesthesia and did find that aphantasic individuals were more likely to report being associators rather than projectors.

[Cydaea]

I don't have too much to add to this, but I believe I do apply. The images are fuzzy though, rarely in true detail. It's definitely a thing where the result is pretty individual even if you 'have it'. It's definitely easier to framework from or mix together 'known' images than to really create something, and I notice the stability actually goes down the more specific I try to get to it. They're safer in the head than if they're trying to be coaxed out.