Wait you mean people actually see things other then darkness when they close their eyes and imagine stuff? For real?
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I mean, it’s hard to describe but yes. Not see with your eyes, not like hallucinating, but in one’s “mind’s eye” people without aphantasia can visualize things to varying degrees.
This thread is so interesting to read as someone who is kind of on the opposite side – if anything I have an overactive imagination, and visualizing and imagining is so crucial to my thought and memory process that it’s very hard to imagine being without it.
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Apparently so. Weird, huh? And it’s only taken me 62 years to find out.
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Yes! I do the rhythmic phrases thing too. I thought that, as I remember song lyrics from decades ago, something song-like would work for me. So I try to make rhymes with a strong rhythm. Doesn’t always work, but it’s better for me than imagining some surreal situation.
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That’s completely normal. None can imagine how things look like without a lot of experience.
People who choose a colour from a swatch are always surprised that the colour looks more saturated on a large surface.
I went to an art school and architecture university and I can confidently say that creating something is a process everyone needs to learn. You don’t just visualize something. There is a method you need to imply and step by step work towards a result you like (going on wrong directions etc.).
There are methods you can learn and there is something like a design theory, if you are interested in that there are tons of books about interior design. Eg what’s the effect of colours (making spaces looking more narrow or wider and even make you feel hotter or cooler).
This is a science and has nothing to do with talent.
(Sorry for the wording before, that was a mistake and I changed that)
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Also on the low low end of the imagining scale here.
So I, too, use rhythm to help me remember. Often I’ll change some song lyrics to suit, from a memorable bit of a song. For the most part I ignore the ‘hints’ and find my own memorable rhyme or phrase.
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In my experience, I wouldn’t describe it as “seeing”. I would compare it to reading a word, like “circle” for example, and being able to know, in a sense, what it would feel like to observe a circle with my eyes. I would describe it as an experience similar perhaps to humming a song and knowing what it would feel like to actually hear the song. Or perhaps, it’s similar to seeing a fire and knowing the pain that result from touching it.
In other words, I’d describe it as thinking about what it would feel like to experience observing a particular object or scene with my eyes. I think this wording more concretely describes my experience than “seeing things in my mind’s eye”.
When people “close their eyes and imagine”, I think they close their eyes because it’s easier to imagine the optical stimulation when you’re not already actively taking in actual optical stimulation. Similar to the way it might be easier to think about words or a song when there isn’t a lot of loud background noise.
I wouldn’t identify myself as an aphant based on the anecdotes in this thread, as your experiences generally don’t match my own. I can imagine things and I do have dreams, but the images are faint and dark, and visualizing anything more intricate than coarse details takes quite an active effort. However, it also seems clear to me that some people (particularly, visually creative people) have a greater ability to vividly imagine things than I do. It used to be hard for me to comprehend how others could have such vivid imagery in their minds.
That being said, when it comes to the mnemonics, I also feel that I rely heavily on wordplay, rhymes, and remembering stories than I do by strictly only trying to remember visual images. It’s not that I don’t visually imagine things for the mnemonics, its just that I don’t always do it. Often, trying to remember and visualize the stories takes significantly more effort than remembering things more verbally.
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Are you saying that there is material that I can study in order to have a more vivid imagination and more vivid dreams?
Also, do you think it would be fair to say that someone “having aphantasia” simply means that someone “hasn’t learned the ‘methods’ to skillfully visualize images”?
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Why? Is it so hard to believe that people are different from you?
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It is very much not a disease, nor is anyone claiming it to be. We know it is a difference in cognitive experience, and we can to an extent show that difference exists via various scientific methods of monitoring brain activity, with fMRI being one of the more common (I would need to see if anyone has done EEG, CT, or PET imaging of this).
Choice of language is important, and even more important is not using language that would make the ones here who share this experience feel as if something is wrong with them. So to those reading this, I assure you, nothing is wrong. Your experience of the world differs from others in an unexpected but personal way, and that’s pretty cool.
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Yes! 
Thank you for asking!
I think it is a lack of training and everyone has the potential to actually really hear, see etc. things that are not there.
I had sometimes the experience eg to singing a song in my head and suddenly it turned into really hearing it with all the instruments, but that didn’t happen often and only for songs I heard many times before.
Same for seeing things. Usually I don’t see things from my memory but it can happen, especially eg if I eat a food that I haven’t eaten for many years that makes me remember my family and houses I was brought up. I can the see my family members and hear their voice like as if they are real but only for short times.
You can definitely train everything. Eg visualization, there is a yoga technique where you close your eyes and try not to think and only concentrate on breathing. then you try to visualize (to see) a number, like 1, with closed eyes, eg in a white letter. After you are able to see that number you you on to see 2 and so on. It is a very effective training.
But the way you ask your question, I can not answer more specifically. What it is exactly you want to visualize?
Because I think there is a big difference in visualizing something from your memory that you know already (like faces of your loved ones or numbers) or something you have to make up first in a way like how Jourm looks like. So you would need another technique to make up a character in your mind. But I know many professionals in creative fields and they all say (if they admit to it and usually they do) that being creative is basically to have a large pool of input from which you recombine things.
I also cannot imagine how an interior will look like or how Jourm looks like if I don’t make an active effort to do so. For the case one I have learned how to do it, for case 2 not. But my experience with case 1 gives me enough guidance to be confident to think about a way to do it for case 2 as well if I would want to do so.
I just don’t think it is necessary to visualize the mnemonics to remember them, that’s all.
To aphantasia, my thought is, that as I explained before, everything you can imagine is a recombination of things you hear before or of things the shared unconsciousness contains. And because it is a fact to me that that shared unconsciousness exists (archetypes, Jung) and I cannot imagine anyone without any previous experiences living, so the conclusion for me is, the aphantasia cannot exist in a sense a total absence of Phantasy as an ability to imagine something that is not existing yet, but I do think that people don’t have the same ability to recombine what they have at hand for various reasons and yes I think it is possible to train it.
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Sorry, the wording of it being a disease was a mistake.
I thought people think about it as a disease in a way and I wanted to point out that there is nothing wrong with them.
Did not work obviously, sorry.
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You would be wrong then. A recent case involves an architect who lost the ability after a stroke:
There is a definite neurological difference whether it’s congenital or induced in some way.
If you watch the video that @Thud posted about the level of ability in visualizing things, then what you’re talking about would be someone going from a 3 or 4 to a 7 or 8, which I agree is plausible.
But when you start from 0, there’s nothing to improve. You just don’t have the hardware.
Aye, agreed.
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I’ve started to just write down my Radicals & Kanji on paper whenever i get them, i like writing them anyway.
With vocab I’d only write it down when i get it wrong though.
My first time here i noticed that i’d just forget Mnenomics before i forgot the actual Kanji and stuff.
So i reset at lvl 21 and now i’ve been doing that since then
Thank you for the link to this article. It was published just months after I got my degree in cognitive science, and so close to a year after I took my Human Memory class. Case studies such as this are invaluable for the clarity of information they bring or for simply giving us a starting point for investigation where there wasn’t one previously. I plan on pursuing cognitive linguistics as my area of focus, but I still love learning about discoveries and advancements in other areas of cognitive science.
Fun information I felt like sharing just because: the word for cognitive science in Japanese is 認知科学, which is really fun to say aloud with the pitch drop on 学 
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Yeah it’s a difficult area of study since, much like the inner monologue. Without any reliable external manifestations, it’s hard to tell whether some is neurotypical or not.
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Nothing in particular, actually! Your elaboration was the answer I wanted, thank you!
I think of “imagining” and “thinking” as physical actions, no different than walking or talking. So it makes sense to me that there are “techniques” that one can practice to perform those actions more effectively or intuitively.
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One important thing an art teacher told us we: “Being able to draw is being able to see”.
That means first you have to learn how to look.
And I think drawing a plan, a painting or visualizing an image is basically the same thing.
It is not something mechanical I think.
Example: In order to draw humans better it is better to learn anatomy than practicing drawing.
In order to be better in drawing a plan you need better access to the information it has to contain (laws etc).
An architect’s work can be done entirely without visual imagination. Maybe, at least I think people who are not architects overrate that part massively.
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I just wish the opposite was also true 
. I can definitely see, but can’t draw at all, because very quickly the proportions get messed up.
Regarding aphantasia, I thought about it recently, but I think I’m still on the other end of the spectrum, because as a kid I kind of learned how to overlay images on top of what I see. It’s not perfect and I can’t make the images sharp, because it’s hard to trick visual inputs (duh!), but still works to some extent. Same with playing back sounds in my head.
Very much! I think my overall creativity flattened in the last couple of years to the point I’m not able to answer questions in which I’m supposed to come up with something. I fail those questions in any language.
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There are many free accessible proportion diagrams on Pinterest. Please have a look at them. I was very intimidated for many years because I thought “I can’t draw a plan”, but it really is just the knowledge you have (or not have).
Proportion studies are super interesting!
You know all kind of intimate details about people if you know the rules 
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