You say “apple” to me and I’m #1, glossy skin, insides, all that
And how in the hell does one navigate life, or enjoy a book, if they’re not a #1?! Reading a book is like watching a movie. I subconsciously assign actor’s faces to characters and watch as the book rolls on.
Yet #5’s are not handicapped in the slightest. They’re so “normal” that mankind is just now figuring out we’re far apart on this thing. Fucking weird.
EDIT: Showed this to my wife and she was somewhat mystified as to what I was asking. Pretty sure she’s a 5. I get frustrated as hell when I ask her to describe a thing and she’s clueless. “Did the radiator hose pop off, or is it torn and cracked?” “I don’t know!”
EDIT2: The first Star Wars book after the movie came out was Splinter in the Mind’s Eye. I feel like I got that title. What’s it mean to you?
I’m a #5 on that scale.
I won’t say I’m not jealous of people who’re #1s. However, to directly answer your question, it’s not like our heads are empty. You think apple and (apparently) ‘see’ an apple. I think apple and it’s like thinking of how you’d describe an apple. It’s red, it’s round. It has a stem. It’s juicy. It tastes good… but I can’t see it. Or anything else. They’re just thoughts.
I have a very difficult time with facial recognition, presumably as a result of this. If I’m watching a movie where there’s a lot of characters that are shown but not named, I have a difficult time following that. I need to be able to assign names to them to keep them straight in my head, and often-times if a character isn’t named but they’re important, I’ll assign them a name myself just to have something to track them with. I can recognize people I interact with a lot obviously but if you asked me to describe what someone looks like who I’m not currently interacting with, that’s very difficult for me to do, beyond very surface-level stuff, like their gender or their build. If I had to describe someone for a police sketch, I’d be useless at that. Remembering facial features is like remembering a list of words; I can’t just call up an image of them to describe… if I haven’t already committed that description to memory, I can’t describe the person.
It’s funny, honestly, because I never realized this wasn’t how everyone is until I saw the image you linked some years back. I actually called up my mother immediately after and asked her what she could see. The conversation went something like:
“When you think of an apple, can you see the apple?”
“Yes…”
“Yeah, but like… you can actually see it, though?”
“…yes…?”
“Yeah but I mean like… you can see it, as if you’re looking at it?”
“…yes, what is this about?”
I think I’m a one, but I might be a five and I can’t tell, because how do I know what format my brain uses to tell me apple? I just know that it does.
I can imagine tastes well enough to cook pretty well and can often predict what a dish will taste like with pretty good accuracy ( I just recently saw a recipe for chocolate rosemary banana bread, and I could imagine that combination, even though I’d never had it before), so there are clearly some senses I can do it for. I think I can also do it visually, but I can’t exactly print it out, so I just know that I’ve received the thought.
If you close your eyes and focus on an apple, what do you see? My understanding is that people without aphantasia / who are “1s” can actually see an image of the apple, as though they were looking at it. If you just see black, no image at all, you might be a 5.
I think I’m overthinking this, but I can’t tell how you would know that you’re seeing it. I think I see it if I try, but my natural inclination is more like I know the apple’s there but I’m not looking at it.
Bizarrely, I am sure that I can “see” aspects of the apple, because that’s how I’m trying to focus on seeing it. Like, I can see the dimple where the stem connects and the curve of the apple with natural color variation for the part of the apple that I can see, but if I try to zoom out, it’s back to awareness of the apple.
I think I’m overthinking it, because I can “see” approximations of the apple variations in this post, but maybe it’s because they’re two dimensional.
It’s possible that you’re a 3 or a 4. My understanding is that people who are 1s can see the apple as though it was there in front of them. They can rotate the image in their minds, break it in half and examine the insides, see the seeds and the veins on the leaf and the discoloration near the stem. Zooming in or out isn’t problematic at all.
If you’re a 5, you can certainly be aware of these things - that they’re features of an apple - but if you really focus on seeing the apple - as though with your eyes, rather than just thinking about the features of the apple as qualitative properties - you can’t do it. It’s just blackness.
I’m not sure what difference this makes, but I can see snapshots of each of those, just not video. Though if I imagine biting into an apple, I can get all the senses together.
I think I might have just been trying to isolate sight from the other senses, because the only real experience I have with only the sight of apples is in pictures, so it being automatically 2d does make sense.
Yeah, checking now, I can see those things as well as long as I’m also feeling, hearing, and smelling them.
Thank you! I first learned about this a while ago and I’ve occasionally wondered about it. I don’t think I would have figured it out without you talking me through it.
You’re welcome! It’s a topic I find intriguing, and it’s always interesting to discuss the different ways people experience these things, now that I realize we’re not all the same. :)
I had that exact same conversation with my mom but it went like this:
“Ok mom, picture a cow in your head”
“Oookayyy”
“Now you can see a cow right?”
“What do you mean”
“Like… You can see a picture of the cow, right?”
“Nooo”
My dad chimes in “yes, obviously”
“…crap. Mom, I have some news for you”
Both of us grew up thinking we had no imagination or were dumb. I remember being incredibly frustrated when a teacher taught us the concept of the Memory Palace where you picture things in rooms of a house. Like if you had to remember five playing cards you’d picture a room with 7 red clowns, with hearts on their cheeks. Then in the next room you’d picture a king, holding up a spade, etc. That just made it harder for me to remember and the teacher kept telling me I wasn’t listening or trying.
I feel that explanation about being useless to a sketch artist on a spiritual level, that blew my mind as a kid. To this day I can’t really describe what my parents or wife looks like, I can just list characteristics. I feel my brain trying to visualize but then it comes up empty
I used to want very much to be an artist, or at least, be able to draw capably, but it’s always seemed impossible. I can think of what I want to draw in a macro sense - like, if I was thinking of that famous Norman Rockwell painting with the boy with the bindle sitting at the diner next to the police officer, I can certainly imagine the scene. Just thinking of that painting from memory, the officer is looking down at the boy who’s looking up at the officer, there’s a man behind the counter in a white outfit looking at both of them with an amused expression, there’s some pastries or donuts or something on the counter…
But to draw something, it feels like you’ve got to be able to imagine the micro details, and without references to look at, I just can’t do that. The same is true if I was going to try to describe the minutia in the painting - what color is the officer’s hair? Are any of the characters wearing glasses? What do the wrinkles in their clothes look like? What kind of shoes are they wearing?
I even have a difficult time commissioning artwork as a result of this, because it’s difficult to describe what I want without having something visual to reference.
I’ve seen a recommendation for the books ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’ by Betty Edwards and ‘The Creative License: Giving Yourself Permission to Be The Artist You Truly Are’ by Danny Gregory. The commenter also attached their drawings from before and after, saying it took a quite short time to go from rudimentary scribblings to full-fledged detailed realistic drawings. So perhaps these books help, though I’ve got a feeling they might be about drawing from references.
I’m not really an artist, but for myself I resolved this problem by making decisions like that when I come around to those details. I.e. I’ll choose the fitting shoes when it’s time to draw the shoes. And of course, sketching is for planning this kind of stuff before drawing proper begins.
I’ll give this a look! Thanks for the recommendation!
I don’t think I’m really explaining the problem well, but like… If I don’t have a visual reference, I just can’t imagine (or draw) what the minute details actually look like in those situations. An artist might be able to take a side-profile picture of a shoe and visualize what that would look like if it was a front or back or diagonal viewpoint, and draw it into their scene. I know what a shoe looks like… I can describe one, I know a shoe when I see one obviously, but when it comes to needing a level of detail sufficient to actually draw the lines - to know where the next line should go - I come up blank. I can draw something and recognize that it doesn’t look like what I want, but it’s difficult to actually identify what it is that I do want unless I stumble on it.
I can draw very low-detail things. Stick figures, say, or basic outlines, but the details come very hard to me.
The person who recommended those books said they ‘teach how to draw what you see instead of what the brain tells you to draw’. Which is a bit odd, and I don’t know if they meant drawing from references specifically, but it kinda sounds like it might help with capturing an object how it should look. Especially since their ‘after’ example was a detailed drawing of a crow down to the feathers.
I’m actually simultaneously intrigued and a bit wary of these books, since I prefer unrealistic and quirky style and want to develop one like that for myself, but am afraid I might go for detailed looks if I learn to do that.
I have aphantasia as well but I do actually have something sort of like a memory palace… kinda. It should be completely useless when I’m awake, but isn’t. I have a dream town, and every place I’ve dreamed about more than three times in the last ~20 years is there in a surprisingly consistent and exceptionally vivid way, like logging into a mmorpg, but spawning in random places. If not for it being easily recognizable as “my town”, I’d struggle to tell it from waking reality because that’s the only other time I experience “sight”. It’s genuinely unsettling sometimes, when my brain makes a new place, to not know if I was dreaming. Maybe that’s why I revisit places until they feel comfortable and familiar and get incorporated into the town.
I say it isn’t completely useless because I use spacial memory to “go places” when awake. I can’t see it, but I know what’s there if I go there, the same way I can mentally count the windows, and know what’s around them, in my house without visually touring the house; I think about where I go to open windows on a nice day, and count the stops.
I can’t put things into the town purposely. Locations or objects, unfortunately. Everything has to already be there if I want to make use of it. But if I can find a useful thing on my spacial tour, I can make note of where I found it, or move it to somewhere more useful. Like the finding the windows exercise, but, to continue your example, I happen to recall that next to window 3 is a Christmas cactus with pink heart-shaped flower buds, and I choose to ”move it” it to the 7th window of my tour. (And yes, if I make note that I’ve moved something, it does stay there when I dream, so that’s really neat)
Genuinely not that useful for things people probably normally use a memory palace sort of thing for, like short-term memories, (finding useful objects is difficult, and sometimes requires a lot of in-dream exploring, which takes actual time) but somewhat useful for certain long-term things, like numbers or recipes. And as a bonus, when I forget something, I’ll often stumble across it in my town and be reminded. Like the recipe for my mom’s cheesecake is the literal ingredients just sitting on the counter in the pocket floor she lives in (she’s a nightmare I had often enough to join the town’s residents, but I shoved her in an impossible floor so I can avoid her). I put that recipe there because I like to modify it, and I often forget what the base recipe is. It’s not written down in the normal sense because I’ll lose it, but it’s simple enough for a representation like that to be easy to hold onto.
But I’ve had similar frustrating experiences with people telling me to visualize things for whatever reason. Like nope, my internal computer is GUI-free. Text output only, with a screen reader. Not even multiple voices, which I hear is a thing most people can do, just the one default reader voice.
On the subject of not being able to visualize people, if there’s someone you haven’t seen in a long time, do you falsely match other people up with the description? For example, my mom died when I was 23, and I’m almost 40 now. It’s been so long that I genuinely don’t remember what she looks like unless I’m looking at a photo. But I know her general description, and when I see other women who fit the description I -feel- that they look just like her even though they usually don’t, actually.
I’ve been told on Reddit that people with aphantasia can actually do the ‘memory palace’ thing. But, since it was just one commenter who didn’t quite describe how it would work, while I myself can visualize but dislike the ‘palace’ technique, I have no further information as to how to do it.
Good heavens! I learned about the memory palace in a Hannibal Lector book, thought it was genius, assumed everyone could do that.
I’m basically the opposite. I can remember peoples faces very well but have a hell of a hard time trying to remember their names. I’d say I’m a 1 or 2 on this scale, depending imon if I’m fully engaged with the content (like reading a book).
I’d never really connected my lack of a mind’s eye with my inability to follow unnamed characters through a movie until you just said that. 🤯
So you never have sexual fantasies? If somebody asks you to describe how something looks, how are you able to do it? Can you at least remember the colors red and blue?
I have sexual fantasies, but they’re more like reading erotica than watching porn.
I imagine I describe things just like I expect others do, except that instead of having a catalogue of pictures to reference, I have a filing cabinet of documents with descriptions of those things. The concept of a ‘photographic memory’ is completely foreign to me. If I’m walking down the street and I see someone get mugged, then I get asked about it later, I can recall and recite the things I specifically took notice of in the moment, but if I want to be able to give a description of e.g. what the person was wearing or what color their hair was, I need to consciously observe those things and commit them to memory at the time. As I understand it, some folks can just recall the event and ‘replay’ it in their mind, and recall things they might not have taken direct notice of originally; I definitely can’t do that.
But aren’t you visualizing the assigned character’s face? I think we all have varying amounts of this depending on what it is. It sounds like you can visualize faces, but not spaces.
Edit: I see you say further down that you have a difficult time with facial recognition.
Everyone’s brain does such wildly different things.
Can’t visualize faces at all; I think you pulled that quote from a different post. ;)
The thing to remember, though, is that… I didn’t even know this was something that I “couldn’t do” until it was pointed out to me that others can do it. I just assumed everyone else was being metaphorical when they said they “visualized something” in their head, or whatever. So whereas you hear it and think “Oh gosh, these people can’t do this very normal thing! That must be awful!”, to us, it’s more like we’ve just been living our lives as normal and then 30+ years in, we discover that most people have a superpower that we don’t have.
But is it a superpower if the ability hadn’t been called out until the 21st century? That’s what kicks my ass. We can be so radically different, on what to me is a fundamental cognitive skill, yet it doesn’t make enough of a difference that the ancients didn’t figure it out three thousand years ago!
Thoughts are a weird thing to describe. I bet it just never really occurred to anyone to discuss specifically what they see in their head when they think of a thing - everyone just assumed what they saw was the same thing everyone saw.
It’s like the theory that the color you see as green might not be the same color I see as green - how do you actually determine that?
Oh I see, you were quoting OP. My mistake.
I think it’s kind of cool that are brains adjust.