10 years ago, I’d have put my ability to visualise at 0 out of 10. Practice and occasional halucinogen use has got me to 2 out of 10. It causes no end of problems in day to day life, so I’m interested to hear if anyone has tips or just experiences to share so it doesn’t feel such a lonely frustrating issue.
edit informative comment from @Gwaer@lemm.ee about image streaming, I did a bit of digging on the broken links, the Dr isn’t giving the info away for free anymore without buying their (expensive) book, but I found some further info on additional techniques here, pages 2/3: https://nlpcourses.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Image-Streaming-Mode-of-Thinking.pdf
That sounds a lot like aphantasia. I have friends who can strongly visualise and they claim it’s like an inner TV that they can control & manipulate.
I think that you’re falling into the same trap like many others here. Not saying you don’t have aphantasia, but e.g. the subreddit is full of people deluding themselves into believing they suffer from aphantasia. Because their experience is similar to what Fondots said.
I have the same exact experience. But I can still rotate 3D images, paint scenes, draw maps, watch spaceships or compare color palettes in my mind.
Every questionnaire is kinda based on “do you see it like in real life or nah?”. Depending on your definition of “seeing”, imo people with the same level of visualisation might choose opposite ends of the spectrum.
I think the “mind’s eye” is also partly a “skill” thing.
I remember distinctly as a child doing a great deal of “work” developing my mind’s eye. I didn’t have TV at home, so I read a lot, and that necessitated me being able to take text on paper and make mind’s-eye models of what the things on the page might actually look like (often without any visual references at all)…and I recall the early ones were definitely vague and fuzzy.
As I got older and did this more, and was exposed to more visual images of different things, my ability to visualize (and “hear”) with detail got better, as with any skill.
I suspect folks who have the ability to use their mind’s eye, but who haven’t been pushed into (or interested in) developing it might not realize what a “trained” mind’s eye can do because they haven’t developed that skill.
But I do think there are some people with legit aphantasia who don’t even have the weak, untrained mind’s eye that most people start out with.
Sorry I’m well late replying to this! For some reason I didn’t get the notification.
I’ve been trying really hard to boost my visualisation skills. The best I can do is a vague suggestion of an image, it’s like made out of mist and dissipates instantly.
I think there’s probably like you said, a lot of people who think not being able to conjure a distinct internal image = aphantasia. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure I’m aphantasic as I score extremely poorly on any tasks that require mental image projection (eg manipulation of 3D objects, spatial reasoning etc). Iirc last time I did an IQ test which broke down IQ into various regions, I scored 17% on that part. And there’s practically nothing there when I shut my eyes and concentrate.
I would wager that without having done halucinogens a number of times, that score / my ability would be even lower.
I have Aphantasia but I also have a strong spatial awareness sense. I can rotate shapes in my mind, I can position things in my mind and compare them in terms of size, shape and relative location etc.
But I’m not falling in to a trap, because I do have Aphantasia. I can’t compare colour palettes, because I can’t imagine colours. I can’t look at the texture of one of my mental objects and imagine what it feels like, because it doesn’t have an appearance to convey texture.
The best analogy is like when you close your eyes and you know where the door and window in the rooms are still, you can point at them even though you can’t see them. That’s my spatial sense, but I can do it for things that I’ve made up in my mind
Since how I’m describing things seems to be ringing at least partially true to you, I feel like that kind of reinforces my point, because I would absolutely not say that I have aphantasia. I think we may be having very similar experiences, and we’re just finding very different ways to describe it because the right words to describe it don’t really exist, at least not in English at the level we’re able to converse at (maybe there are better words that are in common use in psychological or neurological circles, but to most of us would just be meaningless jargon.)
The inner TV thing is not a bad way of putting how I experience it(personally I tend to think of it as more of a 3d animation program, because I have far more freedom to move things around, change “camera” angles, sizes, shapes, etc.) but it’s also not not totally accurate to what I experience either. I could describe it as a full-on audio, video, smell, taste, touch, temperature, etc. experience happenening in my head, but it’s also different sort of experience than actually experiencing those sensory inputs in the real world. It happens in parallel to my real world experience, and is equivalent, occasionally even overlaps with it, but is still a separate and different experience.
I think of it sort of like how hot (temperature) food and hot (spicy) food activate very similar sorts of pain receptors in your brain but are still very distinct sensations. I’m pretty confident that if you found people who have absolutely no experience or knowledge of hot peppers and fed them a habanero, then asked them to describe the sensation of eating it, that most of them would probably come up with descriptors like “hot” or “burning,” and we can all understand that, there is something in common between those two sensations that is hard to describe, but they’re not exactly the same, you’re not going to eat a ghost pepper and think that your tongue is actually on fire.
For me, the relationship between visualizing something in your mind and actually seeing something with your eyes is a lot like that, and probably even more similar.
And if someone lands on different words to describe spicy food, like maybe “tingling” or “itching” they’re not wrong, even if we disagree with their word choice, nor are they experiencing something totally different than we are, their personal experiences have just led them to choosing different words to describe the same thing. What I’m describing as seeing or visualizing, or as an inner TV or 3D modeling program, you might might be experiencing the exact same thing but finding different words to describe, and we’re both using our words in ways that don’t make sense to each other.
There may also be sort of a skill component, some people have a knack for visualizing, and others have to actually develop that skill in some way, and maybe not everyone has the right opportunities or desire/motivation to develop that skill. You say you’ve somehow built yourself up from a 0 to a 2, so who’s to say you haven’t been doing it sort of subconsciously your whole life and you’ve just grown to have more conscious control and/or awareness of it? And maybe with the right training (and I don’t know what sort of training that would be) you could continue to develop that.
And even with that increased skill, you may still find different words to describe how you’re experiencing it.