Thank you for this video -- it's a shame more people haven't seen it (compared to all those lazy "influencer" videos that made aphantasia a "fad conversation" for a few minutes many years ago). For many, many years, I asked people if they could visualize things in their head, and everyone (and I do mean everyone I ever asked) always replied that they could see images in their mind's eye. "Aphantasia" had not been coined, so it's possible that most people just associated whatever was happening in their minds with the idea of "seeing images in the mind." Nevertheless, when pressed to actually describe what they saw, they struggled to say anything meaningful. If I asked them what they saw when they read a book (and whether or not what they were "seeing" in their mind's eye interfered with the perception of the words written on the page), they tended to have really lousy answers. When I asked them if they saw the "conjured image" better with their eyes shut than with their eyes open, they tended to give very muddy answers that didn't help at all. As the interview proceeded, I found that most people tended to wildly overestimate and "over-represent" their ability. It was frustrating for everyone involved (no doubt due to the fact that thinking and imagining is such a private experience, and we clearly lack the language and education needed to make sense of the differences between thought, perception, and imagination) Although it pertains to a different part of the brain (I assume), I found it helpful to think in terms of sound. If I asked someone to imagine a loved one's laughter, or if I asked someone to think about a very famous song or a famous singer's voice, most people reported that they could "hear" it (in their "mind's ear"). And yet, curiously, they were more willing to admit that they weren't "really" hearing it. It didn't have the same acoustic qualities. They couldn't turn up the "volume" and drown out other sounds. When asked about sound, it seems to me that people had an easier time reporting the "weakness" of the "signal." Regarding visualization, on the other hand, most people (in my experience) made claims that fell apart when they were pressed with precise questions and were asked to pay very careful attention to language and description. Thanks for this video. I hope more people watch it.
My aphantasia is so universal that even the statement "I don't have mental images" is hard for me to wrap my intuition around. It's more that I can't make sense in the first place of what thought would have to do with illusions of sense data. They seem like radically different things.
Interesting! I was thinking something similar, about Anauralia in particular. My internal dialogue is very active. Constant even. So it's hard for me to wrap my head around a "quiet mind".
But do you really HEAR a voice audibly or do you experience the sensation of words? I read words in my head and talk to myself internally, but I don't really HEAR anything. I think a lot of this discussion is in danger of being a linguistic trap.@@RealNorthernFox
Thank you for this video. I have been struggling to get my head around mental imagery. I couldn't verbalize what goes on in my head because linguistically all words are tied to the visual experience. I experience what an object or scene is in my head, but I don't 'see it', I experience it. I am an artist and have worked in the creative industries for 35 years and can design a building and walk around it in my head but I don't see a movie, I experience something but I can't explain it. This video got the closet so far.
I think of my memory as a data stream without pixels. I can assign locations where pixels would go, and transfer this to a physical drawing on physical paper, but I cannot see it in my mind.
I would like to see a deeper study on Aphantasia and psychedelics. I dont have mind image but when taking psychedelics i do. Maybe there's a link between the two
I would say I consider myself to have this aphantasia. (Please keep in mind I know nothing about it and I am not a doctor. But I can hallucinate using at least several catalyst medicines. I also dream occasionally and I have had lucid dreams with full dream immersion. Until I started meditating. Now that I have been practicing meditation for a couple of months consistently, I will occasionally visualize flashes of images. Typically these flashes are of random people or places and I am not actively thinking about anyone or anything... As I am also learning about Advaita Vedanta. Clearing the mind is my biggest challenge since I describe everything to myself rather than visualize. However at least I don't have to struggle clearing my mind if visualized imagery when I close my eyes.
I know this might sound completely weird but I have two people I know with aphantasia who haven't been able to visualize anything their entire life. They both experienced visualizing colors or lines and other things after watching a particular youtube video titled "Deep Lucid Dreaming Hypnosis For Lucid Dream Induction | Enter REM Sleep Cycle & Induce Lucid Dreams". I'm curious if anyone else with this disorder would experience this effect. I have no idea what's going on to cause that to happen but they seemed really excited about the experience.
That's fascinating! Aphantasia is such a unique and varied experience for those who have it. It's interesting to hear that this video had an effect. It would be intriguing to see if others with aphantasia have similar experiences. The mind is truly a mystery!
@@AphantasiaNetwork the first person who had the effect now has visualizations when the music isn't playing and can control them, and is also having visualizations with other music. They seem really excited and happy about this development especially being a musician its like opened a whole new world up for them being affected by music this way.
as i have no qualia attached to trying to recall a loved ones face i'm certain that there and evocable "image" that non-aphantasiacs are able to appeal to. I can recognize the face but wouldn't be able to describe it. also the debate regarding the real perceptions being overtaken seems more like we have a value judgment within our brains to appeal to what is more reliable information from an evolutionary stand point. So there's a hierarchical determination for what is considered the most pertinent preceptory information, and a hallucination/dream is where that value hierarchy is no longer functioning in the necessary way for you to determine the reality around you.
I have full Aphantasia. No mind's eye. Nada.... I close my eyes and it is just dark. As a teen I tried magic mushrooms and other drugs considered hallucinatory and they never gave me any visions. I have had professional hypnotists try to hypnotize me and it also is a no go. I can't meditate unless I want to be very bored. That said I do see images when I dream but that involves your thalamus being active which is a total different mechanism. Not sure what the point of this was for people with true aphantasia. If you can see images when you close your eyes, then you do not have aphantasia.
Hi there! Thank you for sharing your personal experience with aphantasia. The point of discussing the topic of hallucinations is to present an interesting model and different perspective on the aphantasia and hyperphantasia spectrum. Alex presents here a theory of competition between visual perception and mental imagery (that might help explain the variations in our experiences). As your experience highlights, our brains are incredibly unique and varied in their functioning. We appreciate your input and hope to continue fostering understanding and awareness about our unique experiences.
I give up. The accent with the poor audio quality is making it too hard for me to understand what is being said. Please try and improve the audio quality on future videos.
We're working across languages, cultures and time zones, which can be tricky. We appreciate you sticking it out as long as you did. We'll try our best to improve in future videos.
This doesn’t seem right. A small handful of times in my childhood I did visualize a book I was reading and there was nothing quasi about it, it was like a full on movie in my head.
I have to disagree on the quasi sensory stuff. The rest of my family totally “see” an actual image, albeit not overlaying the outside world. One friend describes his imagination as 3d PlayStation screen filling his mind, and he can walk , fly, jump across the lands at any pace or distance he chooses. He perceives himself as existing in the middle of a landscape stretching away from him in all directions. This is not an abstract concept of known attributes at all
He did away with the scale to measure mental imagery (which is just to give people an idea anyways) and replaced it with one way of visualising things (which to him is more spatially based, not actually visual, he seems to assume that everyone is like this, but people I talk to assure me they can "see" what they visualise). I have not watched the whole video, it seems like he doesn't think that hyperphantasia and aphantasia actually exist. And that everyone's brains work the same way. Anyways, I stopped watching after that (about half way through).
Thank you for this video -- it's a shame more people haven't seen it (compared to all those lazy "influencer" videos that made aphantasia a "fad conversation" for a few minutes many years ago).
For many, many years, I asked people if they could visualize things in their head, and everyone (and I do mean everyone I ever asked) always replied that they could see images in their mind's eye. "Aphantasia" had not been coined, so it's possible that most people just associated whatever was happening in their minds with the idea of "seeing images in the mind."
Nevertheless, when pressed to actually describe what they saw, they struggled to say anything meaningful. If I asked them what they saw when they read a book (and whether or not what they were "seeing" in their mind's eye interfered with the perception of the words written on the page), they tended to have really lousy answers. When I asked them if they saw the "conjured image" better with their eyes shut than with their eyes open, they tended to give very muddy answers that didn't help at all. As the interview proceeded, I found that most people tended to wildly overestimate and "over-represent" their ability. It was frustrating for everyone involved (no doubt due to the fact that thinking and imagining is such a private experience, and we clearly lack the language and education needed to make sense of the differences between thought, perception, and imagination)
Although it pertains to a different part of the brain (I assume), I found it helpful to think in terms of sound.
If I asked someone to imagine a loved one's laughter, or if I asked someone to think about a very famous song or a famous singer's voice, most people reported that they could "hear" it (in their "mind's ear"). And yet, curiously, they were more willing to admit that they weren't "really" hearing it. It didn't have the same acoustic qualities. They couldn't turn up the "volume" and drown out other sounds. When asked about sound, it seems to me that people had an easier time reporting the "weakness" of the "signal." Regarding visualization, on the other hand, most people (in my experience) made claims that fell apart when they were pressed with precise questions and were asked to pay very careful attention to language and description.
Thanks for this video. I hope more people watch it.
My aphantasia is so universal that even the statement "I don't have mental images" is hard for me to wrap my intuition around. It's more that I can't make sense in the first place of what thought would have to do with illusions of sense data. They seem like radically different things.
Interesting! I was thinking something similar, about Anauralia in particular. My internal dialogue is very active. Constant even. So it's hard for me to wrap my head around a "quiet mind".
But do you really HEAR a voice audibly or do you experience the sensation of words? I read words in my head and talk to myself internally, but I don't really HEAR anything. I think a lot of this discussion is in danger of being a linguistic trap.@@RealNorthernFox
Thank you for this video. I have been struggling to get my head around mental imagery. I couldn't verbalize what goes on in my head because linguistically all words are tied to the visual experience. I experience what an object or scene is in my head, but I don't 'see it', I experience it. I am an artist and have worked in the creative industries for 35 years and can design a building and walk around it in my head but I don't see a movie, I experience something but I can't explain it. This video got the closet so far.
I think of my memory as a data stream without pixels. I can assign locations where pixels would go, and transfer this to a physical drawing on physical paper, but I cannot see it in my mind.
I would like to see a deeper study on Aphantasia and psychedelics. I dont have mind image but when taking psychedelics i do. Maybe there's a link between the two
Please add closed captions! 🙏🙏🙏
I'm watching in the TH-cam app and I have closed captions available. If you're watching in a browser and you don't, try the app instead.
I would say I consider myself to have this aphantasia. (Please keep in mind I know nothing about it and I am not a doctor. But I can hallucinate using at least several catalyst medicines. I also dream occasionally and I have had lucid dreams with full dream immersion. Until I started meditating. Now that I have been practicing meditation for a couple of months consistently, I will occasionally visualize flashes of images. Typically these flashes are of random people or places and I am not actively thinking about anyone or anything... As I am also learning about Advaita Vedanta. Clearing the mind is my biggest challenge since I describe everything to myself rather than visualize. However at least I don't have to struggle clearing my mind if visualized imagery when I close my eyes.
I know this might sound completely weird but I have two people I know with aphantasia who haven't been able to visualize anything their entire life. They both experienced visualizing colors or lines and other things after watching a particular youtube video titled "Deep Lucid Dreaming Hypnosis For Lucid Dream Induction | Enter REM Sleep Cycle & Induce Lucid Dreams". I'm curious if anyone else with this disorder would experience this effect. I have no idea what's going on to cause that to happen but they seemed really excited about the experience.
That's fascinating! Aphantasia is such a unique and varied experience for those who have it. It's interesting to hear that this video had an effect. It would be intriguing to see if others with aphantasia have similar experiences. The mind is truly a mystery!
@@AphantasiaNetwork the first person who had the effect now has visualizations when the music isn't playing and can control them, and is also having visualizations with other music. They seem really excited and happy about this development especially being a musician its like opened a whole new world up for them being affected by music this way.
as i have no qualia attached to trying to recall a loved ones face i'm certain that there and evocable "image" that non-aphantasiacs are able to appeal to. I can recognize the face but wouldn't be able to describe it. also the debate regarding the real perceptions being overtaken seems more like we have a value judgment within our brains to appeal to what is more reliable information from an evolutionary stand point. So there's a hierarchical determination for what is considered the most pertinent preceptory information, and a hallucination/dream is where that value hierarchy is no longer functioning in the necessary way for you to determine the reality around you.
I have full Aphantasia. No mind's eye. Nada.... I close my eyes and it is just dark. As a teen I tried magic mushrooms and other drugs considered hallucinatory and they never gave me any visions. I have had professional hypnotists try to hypnotize me and it also is a no go. I can't meditate unless I want to be very bored. That said I do see images when I dream but that involves your thalamus being active which is a total different mechanism. Not sure what the point of this was for people with true aphantasia. If you can see images when you close your eyes, then you do not have aphantasia.
Hi there! Thank you for sharing your personal experience with aphantasia.
The point of discussing the topic of hallucinations is to present an interesting model and different perspective on the aphantasia and hyperphantasia spectrum. Alex presents here a theory of competition between visual perception and mental imagery (that might help explain the variations in our experiences). As your experience highlights, our brains are incredibly unique and varied in their functioning.
We appreciate your input and hope to continue fostering understanding and awareness about our unique experiences.
I give up. The accent with the poor audio quality is making it too hard for me to understand what is being said. Please try and improve the audio quality on future videos.
We're working across languages, cultures and time zones, which can be tricky. We appreciate you sticking it out as long as you did. We'll try our best to improve in future videos.
This doesn’t seem right. A small handful of times in my childhood I did visualize a book I was reading and there was nothing quasi about it, it was like a full on movie in my head.
I have to disagree on the quasi sensory stuff. The rest of my family totally “see” an actual image, albeit not overlaying the outside world. One friend describes his imagination as 3d PlayStation screen filling his mind, and he can walk , fly, jump across the lands at any pace or distance he chooses. He perceives himself as existing in the middle of a landscape stretching away from him in all directions. This is not an abstract concept of known attributes at all
He did away with the scale to measure mental imagery (which is just to give people an idea anyways) and replaced it with one way of visualising things (which to him is more spatially based, not actually visual, he seems to assume that everyone is like this, but people I talk to assure me they can "see" what they visualise). I have not watched the whole video, it seems like he doesn't think that hyperphantasia and aphantasia actually exist. And that everyone's brains work the same way. Anyways, I stopped watching after that (about half way through).