I’ve always suspected my wife has this, and I just inquired. She said she can’t picture faces or things, but can recognize them. Her memories are more like feelings. I asked if she were separated from our daughter in an apocalypse, if she could remember what she looked like. She said, “I have no idea what she looks like right now.”
Now she’s in kind of a dark place.
I can’t imagine my families faces, and I prob couldn’t even manage a photofit of my own face to be fair. Its strange when you first realise this isn’t standard for most people and its actually a thing.
Put photos in a necklace for your wife or something similar if it bothers her.
This matches my experience. Everything and everyone has a feeling, not so much a word, or an image, or a number, but a simple to recall, and hard to explain feeling.
If she’s still in that dark place, ask her whether she can recall what your daughter’s “feeling” in her head. If she’s anything like myself, that feeling is the sum of her relationship with your daughter all in an instant. Not only is that something you probably can’t do that she can, it is an interesting way to perceive others. It helps a lot with code switching too, that same feeling of someone else also sets the tone with which you can effectively communicate with them in my experience, though it doesn’t work on everyone.
It’s possible that she hasn’t got aphantasia, but something called face blindness (prosopagnosia). The Wikipedia might be an interesting read for you guys!
I was a decently rated chess player (nationally) in my youth and I have level 5 aphantasia i.e. I see nothing at all.
While I absolutely cannot play or picture game states without a physical board in front of me like most pros can, I had no great difficulty otherwise.
I practiced with a friend at the same general skill level that was very good at playing sans voir, which incidentally is how I realized I don’t have the same mental imagery as him. This was ~25 years ago, and I didn’t run into the word aphantasia until around 2020.
Wait, how do you get ranked for aphantasia? I did sure have it but have never had a name for it
As I understand it it’s simply differing amounts of realism in one’s recall.
I did discuss it briefly with my physician but he more or less shrugged it away as a novelty that can’t be helped. He showed me the chart on Wikipedia and mentioned the lack of information about it in general but also that there might be some overlap with autism.
I have a feeling that it’ll be a while before it can be adequately explained.
Aphantasia is a condition that prevents people from creating mental imagery . It is rare, affecting only about 4% of the global population… My visual memory is like looking through a frosted window. I see some colors and blobby shape and that’s about it.
4% is a pretty big chunk of the population. That’s 1 in every 25 people. Which makes it all the more insane that nobody realised it existed as a condition until just a few years ago.
It really depends on how you define aphantasia. Often the VVIQ score is used, a vividness score ranging from 16 to 80.
About 0,8 % of people have a score of 16, and 3,9 % have a score <= 32. The figures are from one of the more recent studies. Other studies report similar figures, for example one study by Zeman found 0,7 % with a score of 16.
About ¼ of all people with visual aphantasia also have multisensory aphantasia (all classical senses and emotions).
Any mental imagery in general? Like through mind’s eye? Dreaming? I had a mind palace (like no joke) it took me years to build into something I could use, and I had a few seizures in relatively quick succession and I cannot imagine images with nearly the same clarity. My dreams are like trying to swim in molasses while wearing scuffed scratched glasses, and I haven’t been able to access my mind palace in years. Any time I close my eyes I just see vague blurry shapes and colors, there’s an environment there but I can’t see it. Now, I can still see faces and remember them, but imagining in my head kissing my girlfriend is impossible. Her face warps and melts and my mental vision goes fuzzy.
Aphantasia is not actually a real condition btw, the whole “imagine an apple” discourse is completely lacking in rigor. It’s like the online ADHD discourse, or MENSA. It’s a way for boring people to talk about themselves to each other. (Like most of Reddit and Wikipedia.)
No, everyone can imagine an apple. This is stupid. Even this guy admitted he can remember things, he’s just not satisfied with the quality. A cup of coffee would make him see an apple.
This happens to me periodically and I seriously think it means we just need more potassium, less sleep disruption, and more time in nature to absorb green colors (soothing in memory, gives you good dreams) and exercise the eye muscles with long distance focus.
Absorb green colors haha. How many crystals should I carry while I do the absorption?
Are you sheltered or something? Looking at verdant green spaces has been proven to have a positive psychological effect. You should wear crystals over your eyes if you are nearsighted to help. 👓 Aphantasia is just a difference in language games people use. It’s been debunked.
Well I don’t play chess in my head. That doesn’t stop me from being a reasonably decent chess player when there’s a physical board in front of me. I’m not sure why aphantasia would be considered relevant to chess?
Do you have it? I’m just curious how someone would plan multiple moves ahead without an image of changes to the board in their head.
“Well, if I move the bishop here, then it’s pinning the knight to the king. Then I can capture over here, threatening a fork.” etc.
I do. Feel free to ask further if you have more questions.
Basically, when I’m playing, and trying to look multiple moves ahead, at least for me it’s like a logic tree. Exactly like what you described. I just don’t visualise any images. To me, I’ll keep track that the bishop will be on this spot, this spot will be empty, etc etc. I just need memory for that, it doesn’t involve any imagery.
That’s fascinating. What about controlled squares? Like, visualizing the cross-shaped lines extending from a bishop? Or the asterisk-shaped lines extending from the queen?
In my head, I sort of “highlight” them like this:
I have a middling case of aphantasia. I can create a basic image, blurry shapes, low detail, etc. with a lot of focus and concentration. I struggle immensely with faces I haven’t seen a lot, and spatial orientation. Beyond that, I simply think in terms of words more than images.
As far as chess, this means I’m logically thinking out the moves, rather than mentally picturing it. I tend to get a bit overwheled trying to internalize the new board state after more than a couple of moves. I also don’t play chess much, though, and would probably simply train that ability by playing more, just like someone without aphantasia will train visualizing more board shapes ahead.
I just wanted to say I’m almost exactly the same way, and it’s kinda cool to see someone else stuck in this halfway point, lol. The way I describe it is that I can picture the concept of something in my head, but the moment I try to focus on any details, it gets warped or corrupted or simply won’t manifest any more detail. Same on struggling with faces/remembering people, not so much on spatial orientation.
While I haven’t played chess in a long while, I can kinda draw off my experience with similar games and logic problems I’ve worked on. I can kinda hold the concepts in my head, but not really visualize it. So I’ll not be envisioning the chess board, but I can still easily puzzle out “if I take this pawn, that one will take my rook, then I can take it with my knight”, etc.
god yeah, i have aphantasia, but i also dream, so i often experience these unquantifiable dreams, which often bleed into reality, because my brain has never experienced anything other than “physically observing the world” so anytime i dream half the time my brain is just confused as fuck and considers it to be a real event that actually happened, because fuck it why not.
That has been the source of confusion more times than i’d like to admit. My more wacky and obviously not real dreams help a lot with that though.
it’s weird as fuck waking up, and having no mechanism to recall something that “happened” you have this like, weird fleeting state of emotion and vague comprehension of what happened. But no way to visually process it.
