All about aphantasia

Hi, I'm someone who is struggling with partial aphantasia (lack of images in the mind's eye), getting worse during my teens. It might be related to emotional trauma. Does anyone else have a similar problem, or do you know of any methods to help this? I used to read books and have very detailed mental images, but it seems to no longer happen. When I'm attempting to fall asleep, or am waking up and am still half asleep, I have no problem visualising things. Thanks for replies, this is really a big issue for me and I would enjoy life a lot more if I could visualise things for more than a split second.

Your soul is returning to the root of all things while your body has been chosen to roam as an NPC. Mindless obedience and belief in whatever corporate media tells you to think is soon to follow. I'm so sorry anon, I wish we could help, but it's pretty much terminal.

>>4770 I usually try to "visualize" things by sensations; it's in a very abstract way but it is helpful. I just reutilize places I've been before when reading a book.

>>4770 What do you want to see exactly? I can see things but can't control what I see - my imagination has its own will. When I think about an apple my imagination starts cutting it into pieces and now it turned into a train station. I often smash concepts together without having to see them because I sense their "feeling" which gives me the idea about their rightness.

>>4800 OP here the chad cerebration is pretty much me thats kinda reassuring I'd just like to paint pretty pictures in my mind really, for artistic hobbies.

>>4803 My imagination creates exceptionally wild images when I undersleep or are bored so you can try that. You can also ask /drug/ about LSD or some other soykaf people use. I'm mostly the virgin internal voice though, with some chad elements. I slightly hear text while reading and writing. Abstract thinking is on a different layer than image/speech processing. As I said my imagination has its own will. I often see rotating shapes, colorful and metallic structures dancing and shape shifting but nothing I can control really. My imagination doesn't succumb to my will and even tries to make me angry by showing things I don't want to see. I don't know if people really get "pretty pictures" whenever they want.

>>4800 >pic How can one live being only the cerebration chad? I can do both, and I generally use both at the same time but with a much heavier emphasis on internal voice, with some exceptions. I use internal monologue for things that require linearity, such as when I am reading (I can read without internal monologue at light speed but then I forget everything afterwards), organizing a specific set of tasks that I must perform, or when I need to think of something using rigorous/formal logic. I only use cerebration if I am solving a math/programming problem that requires heavy (spatial) intuition and would take a long time to solve using linear logic (and generally uses only working-term memory) or if I'm trying to understand concepts, especially those not trivially physically describable. So for example, I can't imagine myself organizing my time using cerebration without forgetting a lot of tasks, and I can't imagine myself studying for something I dislike without using internal voice, if I did I would forget everything afterwards.

>>4800 For some reason I've lost the Chad Cerebration faculty some years ago after going through the heights of my existential despair. I can no longer have "conversations" with the mute "voice" using my internal voice. He/she/it would send me a non-verbal message and I'd respond with a verbal one back. fuarrrking is like kicking dead whales down the beach ass. He/she/it was a great help in tough arguments with people way beyond my cognitive capabilities.

>>4806 they're for different use cases to be honest. Internal voice is for when you are trying to think something that you might eventually communicate somehow. Cerebration is for flashes of insight or visualization. I have a lot of thoughts that I know I would definitely never be able to put in to words, on the flip side I have a lot of thoughts that just feel like random words or phrases that pop into my head.

Mandala meditation may help. Just start with simple shapes at first if it's that bad and increase complexity and colour as you improve. You look at an image and close your eyes trying to see the image still.

OP again, I usually have the mute internal cerebration doing most of the thinking and use internal speech for fun or to sort of keep myself company, or sometimes when reading. I've been trying to be more open to visualisations and what this lain said about just relaxing and being open to whatever images come up seems to genuinely work for me a lot better than trying to exert some sort of fine control over imagining. The same way that people say lucid dreams can work better if you allow most of it to flow on its own applies here too I think. I put myself in bed this morning and had the intent of staying awake doing some internal journeying. Surprisingly within 15 minutes of waiting and being peacefully aware of my thoughts, I had very detailed visions materialise suddenly, one of a glossy orb, with some shadows being painted onto it and rotated (a bit like a very intricate raytracing demo). I then had a fully realistic immersion into a room with my ex girlfriend, and took the opportunity to ask ''her'' a question about our relationship, ''she'' answered with something helpful and I snapped myself out of it to write it down. This was with indistinguishable real life level fidelity, and i could smell her and kissed her on the forehead. The next thing was another full fidelity experience of being in an unknown room with a friend and experimenting by looking at myself in the mirror and doing a thumbs up. Looked just like myself but might have been slightly different looking at first. So the bottom line is, if you have aphantasia, it might be because of chronic stress and a bit of relaxation could really help. I guess this is why I find it much easier to see things when falling asleep or waking up, because i'm my most relaxed and free to explore mentally. Poggers. >>4805

>>4833 So yeah, thanks for answering my thread lains your advice helped

any fully aphantasiac lainons here? i'm wondering what dreams are like for people with aphantasia

>>4770 I know one good guide, but it's nonenglish. https://vk.com/@-215932256-vizualizaciya https://pastebin.com/LJbTXcd8 So I try to translate some of this. Rules of visualising training 1. Nothing happens just like that, everything has their cause and consequences. You can imagine entities and objects only in dynamic system that have lived by itself in your imagination. 2. The more detailed you feel mechanics and physics of your world, The more vivid and autonomous it would be. Good visualiser doesn't build his world, he lives in it and explore it. 3. Praсtiсe make skill better. The more you do it, the more you succeed. 5. Visualise everything passively during the day. Imagine heavy objects falling, everything burning, or maybe flooding. Choose something you like. Switch the weather, imagine a different temerature outside, imagine any tastes instead of the others, juggle with your imagination constantly and it would develop. There are many, many more text, but my english is a crap.

>>4770 try one of these meditation techniques --> https://archive.fo/lQE5j

I used to have aphantasia, so I trained my imagination every day for months and months. It worked, and my imagination grew in strength, but I suddenly developed schizophrenia. I think my schizophrenia may have been inevitable, but I am certain I would have weathered it way better had my imagination been weaker. Part of the suffering of schizophrenia is an imagination that, because of its strength and immediacy, runs out of control and even turns against you. If you wish to train your imagination, please limit your training and take it slow. Train only during designated sessions and outside of training sessions, do not imagine anything at all. You need the off-time to practice NOT imagining things. The ability to not imagine anything, in which we are all already capable, can be eroded over time if you don't give yourself long breaks. You can lose the ability to remain grounded in reality. >>5975 Don't do number 5. Never "passively" imagine anything, it is the quickest way to lose your grounding. If you insist (lets say you think you have a reason), you must practice your silence. Become proficient at meditating on the breath while imagining nothing at all, and do so regularly. Hopefully this saves you from losing your mind like I did.

>>5359 Full aphant here. It's hard for me to remember whether I actually "saw" something when I dreamt. It's also hard to tell whether I'm actually seeing things when asleep, or just thinking I'm seeing things if that makes sense.

Just dropping in to mention that I am a guy that since his childhood had pretty much vivid imagination. Literally the opposite of aphantasia. I would also remember all my dreams (up to 7 of them in a night sometimes) After I took LSD it was reduced by 50%. Have to force my imagination to think of an image.

this isn't a bad thing. it was found that animators (and more generally, cartoonists) tend to lack mind's eye.

>>6070 bump that's a rather curious factoid to check if that's a true fact

>>5359 I am not aphantastic at all sometimes I dream about reading books and I visualize a full page and text and moving the page along lol >>6065 Ive never taken such drug every time I hear stories about it it just sounds a little too much like playing russian rulette with your mind and I dont really want to do that but maybe its ok for terminally depressed people or pedos or something>>6065

One time I had perfect control over an auditory musical hallucination. There is hearing something like you "hear" and earworm or remember how a song goes. Then there is hearing like an actual bell ringing in your ears while you are falling asleep. This was the latter. It was out of nowhere and illustrated that a type of music I had been pondering is physically/logically possible. (Unless it isn't... which would be surprising and cool in a different way) Since then I've put a bit more effort into learning about music. More pertinent, I've started to develop exercises to build my capacity for deliberate guided musical hallucination. The main exercise is just listening to music at volume so low that sometimes I can hear it and sometimes I can't- right on the threshold of hearing. Then I raise the volume one tic at a time, always trying to hear something and extrapolate. I backtrack to low volumes when I grasp the music well enough, carry that comprehension to autocomplete the missing audio in my head. It's fun when my extrapolations don't match the song as it comes into focus, so I basically was half-hallucinating how the song sounded. It's worked well enough that I've had a few seconds of deliberate (albeit replicated) audio at night. I suspect that listening to songs I've never heard before this way will work well, maybe listening to various remixes of the same song would too? It seems hard to focus on this task when you don't know the song at all. I'm not trying super hard because I have other issues to fix with my life. I was sort of inspired by reading David Huron - Voice Leading: The Science Behind a Musical Art which has to do with harmonics and object/instrument identification as a lens to view types of music. Apparently Renaissance music takes the form of a puzzle that teases you with ambiguity so maybe I should try listening to that.

>>8399 Oh yeah, and I was thinking, if this deliberate noise removal, fill-in-the-blank method worked for me with audio... what if you joined it with the mandala meditation people are talking about? You know how a slat fence with gaps can go clear in your vision if you move past it fast enough? How a screen window looks different when your head is moving versus stationary? That could be something else to base exercises around- seeing things as you know they are, even when partly obscured. I wonder if a mandala meditation technique could be assisted by a web page that generates/elaborates and hides/pixelates parts of a mandala randomly. Would it be best to take chunks that intersect based on the symmetry, so there are like 4 little mysteries each with a shared core of a harder, more memory-based or pattern-based mystery.

>>4770 This is an old thread, but honestly it may describe one of my worst nightmare as a big part of my life revolves around it. My mind eye allows me to move forward by imagining hypothetical scenario, projecting me in another life where I am happy to give me motivation. I also use my mind eye to solve problem in math or just everyday ones. I really wonder how bad does this affect creativity.

>>8401 An average human seemingly grows to be extremely skillful at generating ideas, bad at generating images and sounds, and extremely bad at the other 3 types of sensations. Since creativity is mostly about ideas, losing your mind eye only makes them harder to evaluate, so not much probably?

>>8401 >I really wonder how bad does this affect creativity. Absolutely crippling, but for different reasons than you might think. Consider what happens during a vivid experience: if you pay very close attention, you will notice that every layer of your cognition is actively following and anticipating the senses, down to the minute details of whichever aspect of experience attention is currently directed towards. There's some kind of real-time reconstruction of the scene, or an internal resonance, like the mind is singing along with the sensory orchestra. In many ways, it's a similar headspace to vivid imagination. I'd say the mind IS filling the same space that hosts imagination, giving the experience that extra depth. And I bet it does that using a process similar to imagination - it's just supported from the bottom up, by normal sensory processing, instead of being induced/reenacted in a mostly top-down fashion. Now, first of all, I bet this is how you learn what anything looks or sounds like in the first place (beyond the level of passive recognition). You can only vividly imagine things because your brain learned those patterns of activity in a high level of detail. Someone whose imagination is vague can only reproduce the topmost levels of processing - i.e. high level of abstraction: they can remember what objects were present, spatial relationships, maybe rough shapes, but nothing more intricate. So the most likely cause of aphantasia is the inability to experience the real world vividly. Being perpetually caught up in the internal purgatory of linguistic abstractions. This would explain Galton's observations from the 19th century: most of the aphantasics he surveyed were academics; he found very few among normal people. It would also explain the rise of aphantasia among the general population since: people now spend most of their time staring at text, flat images, mediated reality; or in environments that are, at best, not worth taking in, when they don't outright assault every sense and force people to withdraw. At the very least, the aphantasic is chronically disconnected from the ultimate source of inspiration. Even if he works with a non-visual medium, he's always working with second-hand material. Aphantasia itself is just a symptom. But it's even worse than that: this space where imagination happens (which is also where vivid experience happens) is what higher cognition taps into when you're struck by subtle patterns and nuances in what you're seeing and hearing. Or when you comprehend the deeper details of a piece of art work. Or when you see some ingenious analogy that helps you solve an otherwise abstract and intellectual problem. If you can't conjure things up in your imagination, you have lost access to this space and whatever remains of your creativity is basically analogous to a biological chatbot.