Hello CT folks. It's been awhile! I have a question for you neuroscience virtuosos. I have recently come to realise that I differ from a very large portion of the general populace, in that I lack the ability to create mental images. This is known as aphantasia, and is apparently thought of as fairly rare, occurring in just 2 percent of people. It's a bit frustrating to be unable to visualise things in certain contexts, such as when attempting meditation, or listening to a podcast or lecture where conjuring images is an asset, and at times, a necessity. I am curious if any of you experience this, or if anyone knows in what way the brains of those with aphantasia differ from others. Thanks!
hey faeriel77 , that's really interesting. i've never heard of aphantasia and know little about neuroscience so don't have any answers for you, but some questions:
Can you conjure any internal imagery if it's from a memory rather than constructed/imagined?
What is your experience of dreaming like?
Can you simulate other senses in your mind aside from vision? e.g.) can you play a song in your head, hear a voice? imagine tactile sensations, smells, tastes? if you think of sour candy will you salivate?
Thanks for responding, Sitbone! Sorry it took me a bit to respond, I just started a new job, with odd hours, so I haven't been online much.
I can definitely conjure up sounds, and other sensory experiences, in my mind. Just not visual type imagery. I would say that the majority of my internal experience is verbal and audio. I don't have any visuals associated with memory, just words and facts. I have a very semantic memory.
It is crazy to me that others can actually "see" things in their mind's eye, and up until recently, I had no clue that I was lacking something which is common for most other people.It explains why I lack any type of artistic talent, aND also why I have struggled to successfully utilize visualization techniques for say, meditation. I also cannot reconstruct the faces of my very closest loved ones, even if I were to look upon them, and immediately close my eyes to try.
Going back to your question about other sensory experiences , I can't really imagine or recall taste or touch, but smells and sounds are overwhelmingly strong. I thought I would ask others here if they knew anything about the cause of this difference in internal processing. I also think this illustrates yet again, that humans differ in so many aspects of cognition.
I have a very deep appreciation for visual art of any kind, and I believe this is a result of my aphantasia.
I think I might have a degree of this. I have a really hard time generating images in my head. I can remember faces really well when I see the person, but I can't picture faces in my head very well if I haven't seen the person within a couple days, even close family.
hmm you two are in opposite quadra so that's at least a good indication that it probably isn't dependent on anything in CT, although do you both have unconscious Pi? not that it would necessarily mean anything, i'm sure plenty of unconscious Pi people around here don't have this experience.
I'm not sure about unconscious Pi. I haven't been officially typed. I'll get there one day. If I had to guess though, I'd say I'm TiNe-II-- or something like that. My Ne is pretty strong. But I still don't know what I'm talking about. I talked to my SiFe friend the other day, and he said that he similarly can't generate images and recall faces well. He's probably SiFe-SiSiSi if that's possible.
Kahawa so you have "a really hard time generating images" but it sounds like you can do it to some degree. What is that like?
It's fuzzy, and requires concentration. Sometimes it's easy, simply and automatic "Picture a fork" is easy. But more complicated things, like "an old house", and my thoughts don't lock on easily, but they drift around and change. I can't really hold the whole image all together at once.
If i ask you to picture a dog, maybe you have an image of a dog in your head but it's not well-defined, maybe the details fall away if you try to fixate on the dogs face? something like that?
I can picture a dog, but like I said, it can fall apart a bit. I have to work to keep it all visualized at once. As with faces, I have a hard time picturing the face of a dog that I know, but I can often recall a photo of a dog/face.
And do you have about the same difficulty with reconstructing visual memory as you do with producing imagined imagery?
I think so, not sure. I tend to think that visualisation is somewhat of an Ni/Se thing, but I haven't tested that. I think it's why they like visual diagrams, and chess etc. My SiFe friend and I joke about how those charts with colours and arrows and circles and shapes etc., people see meaning and relationships and progress and goals or something, idk, we see purple, triangle, arrow, big text.
I remember my dreams often. They're visual. I don't remember sounds often. If I write my dreams down I can remember them forever, and revisit them. If I don't, they fade forever. I used to have flying dreams quite a bit as a child, but I would glide without propulsion. Every now and then I've had a dream where I can self propel. It feels mentally challenging. I dream in colour. I still write down the interesting ones. I don't think I see a lot of faces in my dreams though; I just seem to know who is who.
In what sense does visualization seem more of an Ni/Se thing to you? I'm really visual and i do like diagrams or visual aids in general, but a lot of Ne-Si users i know are like this too. Judgment leads' thinking is more semantic and less visual in general i think. i wonder if there is a clear difference in the ways that each P function set goes about visualizing tho.
It's not from any exhaustive kind of research, just from my own experience of interacting with different people in a professional environment. Some people prefer a semantic/relationship analogy to explain something, which I get the impression is Ne, but maybe Ne and Ji? Idk... I haven't analysed it too in depth, so I feel a bit dumb trying to explain it. Other people like spatial examples in order to explain something. I have a TeNi friend who's great at chess (loves speed chess, which I dislike), and when we discuss concepts of philosophy etc he wants to draw a diagram so that he can keep track of the concepts and their relationships. I've noticed this tendency more in my Ni/Se friends, whereas my Ne/Si friends primarily love a good analogy. I assumed that the brain activity that draws meaning from analogous relationships is the same/similar activity that likes puns, etc, something Ni/Se aren't particularly known for, if I'm not mistaken.
The chess thing.. i did't realize Ni-Se was more prone to an interest in it, but i could see an argument for why that might be. So maybe the form of visualization involved in chess is what you're talking about (envisioning realistic event sequences), in regard to being more of a Ni-Se thing?
Yeah, something like that. I think Gary Kasparov is Ni/Se, and Magnus Carlsen, Viswanathan Anand, Anatoly Karpov, they all seem to fall on the Ni/Se spectrum. At the very least, none of them looks at all Ne heavy. Anecdotally from my own experience, my Ne/Si friends, while they may enjoy chess and be decent at it, don't particularly gravitate to it like my Ni/Se friends. I'm decent at it, but not particularly. The idea of blindfolded chess games, or speed playing 30 people at once, just blows my mind. I can't look at a board and quickly understand the positional and potential relationships. It would be interesting to investigate more. I think there's a thread here somewhere someone started on it (chess types).
So perhaps Ne/Si types can be chessmasters too, but perhaps they approach it differently. Like maybe Si chess players are about recognising past patterns and strategies that worked, and memorising lengthy opening moves, and end game procedures. But I don't really have data to go off, I'm just theorising....
The dreams you had where you could self propel, were you lucid?
I wouldn't say highly lucid, but there was a different level of self-awareness. E.g., in my dream I knew that I had trouble self-propelling, and I was aware of the fact that I was achieving something that I couldn't normally achieve. I still find it really strange that gliding is 'easy', and self-propulsion is 'difficult'. Wtf. Maybe it reflects a deeper mental reactivity vs. pro-activity, idk.