So I have aphantasia and Whenever I read or watch something I can only comprehend stuff line by line & forgot about the previous line due to which I can’t analyse the complete topic, Do others face the same issue as well?

For example If I am watching a youtube video, I do listen to every line & understand it but can’t remember it, when the guy says the next line & I comprehend the last line said I forget the before one, this makes it impossible to comprehend the complete video, post watching a video I can’t tell what it was about.

Any tips on how do you guys go about learning stuff?

Sorry for making one of these "do I have it" posts, there's already so many. It's just that I don't really know what exactly is meant when people say they visualize. I understand they aren't physically seeing it with their eyes, and I know I definitely can't visualize particularly well, but I don't know if what I'm doing can be described as visualization at all.

The tests are no use, they basically just ask you to visualize something then ask "can you do it? Scale of one to five", which if I knew if I could do it I wouldn't be taking the stupid test. I can sort of "conceive" of things, for example if I'm imagining a route from one place to another I've found that I sort of move my head in the direction of the turns, and if asked how many chairs are in my home I can think about it and count it, so I definitely have some spatial memory.

I don't see anything really though, it's nothing like looking at the route/my house, I'm in my bedroom right now but I've been asked before what color my walls were and I couldn't remember (the only room I had a clear answer on was my computer room, since I painted it maroon myself). But if you asked me to imagine the color green, I think I can? Like I can get the concept of green even if I'm not looking at it.

Forget about moving or rotating images, picking out detail, or anything like that. If I think of a bird it's not flying or sitting in a tree, but if you ask me to imagine a flying bird I can conceive of it and know it's flying.

Sorry, this post is long, it's super complicated to explain, and I'm probably not doing it particularly well. From what I've said though, does it sound like I have aphantasia or possibly just hypophantasia? I know you guys can't answer for me, I just wanted to describe my exact experience and see what you guys thought.

Thanks!

I ask this wondering if a mental image plays a part in spacial location memory?

Update: I really appreciate all your detailed answers. And of I absolutely don’t mean any offense with this question, or to imply aphants can’t remember things – truly just a sincere question about the relationship between sensory experiences. This question occurred to me as I was navigating a dark room to find a shelf and reach in for something, and wondered if my own experience (as a visualizer) was rooted in my inner image of the space, or in a different kind of spacial memory, or what. Again, thanks for sharing your experience!

For those with aphantasia, does anyone feel like time is irrelevant? For instance, does life seem to last forever, or does a week feel like a month or a year? Do you have a hard time recalling the exact time something that happened in the past?

My wife and I learned together, through conversation one day, that she has aphantasia. It made for an interesting few months of discussion and discovery, along with anger and sadness as she felt handicap.

Curious how others experience has been. It explains many past arguments, but it can also be a crutch. We are both sad about this and I sometimes feel resentment. Would love to hear from others.

May I ask two questions here?

Someone here mentioned that some people lack an internal monologue. Is there a subreddit for that?

Secondly, does having aphantasia affect one's ability to learn pictographic languages like Chinese?

I first learned about aphantasia--and that I'm fully aphantasic, and that other people can really see in their minds--so now when I see scenes like this, it really strikes me and entertains me that before 2023, I would have watched a scene like this and thought that it was just metaphor...

Discussing the Return to Paradise (BBC) series lead elsewhere. She is obviously, but not badly, portraying an ND character and does the blinking thing to change the internal image. I just realised that AuDHD me does this, but in lieu of an image, I do it to change thought thread 😂🤷‍♀️

Just wondered if its just me at the far end of the bell curve as usual, or if its an ASD/ADHD thing irrelevant to seeing the image. Of course it could be linked to that memory centre we activate but dont connect with? 😁

Admittedly, I'm only a week into my aphantasia journey, but I'm starting to get the sense that a much larger percentage than the estimated 1-5% of people cannot actually visualize in their minds.

Since finding out about aphantasia (and more importantly that not everyone was an aphant, lol) I've spoken to around 15 or so friends about it. Demographically most of them are 40-45 yo gay men of varying ethnicity (3 straight females, 1 straight male). Of that group, 4 (5 including me) claim to have no ability to conjure up images in their minds. These are all highly successful professionals living in Manhattan, mostly working in either law or advertising (1 finance, 1 real estate). That's between 25-33% claiming no ability to visualize (I'm not saying I think the number is necessarily that high, just higher than 1-5%). Another 3 claimed to have very dim visuals. 1 claimed to essentially have hyperphantasia (but she exaggerates regularly). Obviously this isn't a scientific study, but I find it hard to believe that in my small cohort, I have such a statistically improbable group of aphants (unless there's a link between homosexuality and inability to visualize, which I suppose is possible?).

I should probably also say, none of them (myself included) seemed to have SDAM, spatial recognition issues, or lacked an inner monologue.

Has anyone else found an unusually high number of aphants in their inner circle or just me?

I found out today that this experience exists, and you can't imagine anything in your mind. Some don't even have an internal monologue!

I literally cannot remember something without literally seeing it (I don't have aphantasia), so how in the world do you recall past events? If you can't bring up the memory in your mind and relive it then what do you do? Do you even reminisce? How does it affect your ability to remember things?

I definitely would like to hear your experiences! Examples would also help alot: like "If I wanted to remember going to the park with a loved one then I..." Type responses would be the most useful. (I also hope I don't come off as rude, I am genuinely curious on how this all works!)

Edit:: after some comments, I think I'm starting to understand (?) So basically.... Y'all just kNow things without having to literally see it or think of it. I think I can relate to that experience but only for memories I can't "visually" remember, but I just know it happened. Typically for me, if I can't visually remember it then I would say "I don't remember it, I just know-" blah blah, so Im thinking that's how it works for y'all? Just knowing it happened is how you remember things?

I found out yesterday about all this, and to me its a literal superpower that humans can 'see' what they imagine. I am in shock that aphantasia isnt the 'normal'. the fact that humans can do this is so beautiful and unreal.

I've been diagnosed with clinical major depressive disorder. if I could just close my eyes and literally see comforting things, I don't think I'd be as depressed. but then again, maybe if I was able to visualise, my body would just have no motivation to do anything because I'm tapped into a VR.

So as the post describes I recently discovered I have aphantasia, I have gone my whole life (37yo man) not being able to create images in my mind and not realising people were actually seeing pictures in their head when they say 'imagine you see xyz' as I use emotion of the feeling of descriptors to create a feeling instead of an image on instinct. My new partner discovered I couldn't picture things and I took a series of tests I could find online that all came back with the same result.

I remember being able to dream in picture regularly when I was a child, they stopped almost completely when I had my first depressive episode that led to the discovery of my bipolar. Since then I rarely dream at all and if I do it's less of a visual dream and more of a dreaming in feeling if that makes sense, I still however several times a year have the same dream over and over again in picture but this time it wasn't the regular dream.

My regular dream is me on a ship at sea, it's a wooden ship with cannons etc, the crew are mixed race between black and white and not in a uniform at all. It always starts the same way and progresses the same till the end, I'm sitting in a dining area eating by lantern light, I hear shouting but can't make it out then get up suddenly and run to 'my' station (it seems familiar, kind of like I belong) and start looking through wooden port windows and loading cannons, it's night time outside and cloudy overhead.

As I load the cannons I get the first real glimpse of my hands/arms and I'm a black person, for reference I'm a white guy, my arms and hands have flecks of whitish scarring, I exchange fire with a ship with white sails for a few minutes before I see the wood splinter in front of me and I wake in a cold sweat and feel exhausted. This dream only lasts a few minutes each time and is always exactly the same, I can remember and describe pieces in detail for a few days after it happens then I lose most of the imagery until I have it again. Most people I have described this too have said it's probably a memory of a past life as the dream never changes and it's so vivid, I am unsure but it feels like it's me in the dream even tho it couldn't possibly be me.

The dream last night was nothing like that however, it was quite strange and I'm still trying to piece together what I remember. I remember being in some sort of field suddenly, I was working with the vegetation (I can't remember what it was) and my hands were sun weathered and brown, some old man nearby shouts something in Spanish and I stand up as do about a dozen others in the field, we walk out of the field into a small wooded area, walk about 40 meters down and walk back into the same field and start working again.

This pattern repeats a few times and as we get to the edge of a field we are approached by a white man, he talks to the only man to talk so far while we work the field and they speak in English for the first time, I can't remember the conversation but it's broken up by the white man's phone ringing and him walking past me saying 'I have to get this' only he walks across the whole field we won't walk across for some reason, that's the last time anyone speaks English in the dream. I then take off a nylon bucket hat and pour water on my head before putting my hat back on and joining the queue walking into the woods and around the corner.

At this point I remember seeing a stream and thinking 'I am not me I wonder who this is and what he looks like' and suddenly I'm looking at this man's arms and walking to the edge of the water, I get a glimpse of the face of the man. It's a Latino man with sun weathered skin in his late 20's, maybe early 30's. He's dirty and wearing sun weathered clothes, I get maybe a 3 second glimpse at his face in the water before the old man yells something at me in Spanish and he shakes his head a few times and starts moving back to the group and I get this sense of losing control and feel a shiver run down my spine.

He returns to the group walking down the path and they go back to working the fields walking in and out of the woods as they move around the area, this continues for a few hours and nothing new happens, nobody except the old man talks and only in Spanish unless they are answering his direct questions occasionally, the man I am seeing the dream through never speaks. After a few hours of this in my dream my alarm goes off and I wake up suddenly.

This dream doesn't feel like my regular one, it also can't be a past life dream as the white man is on a modern phone, I also don't remember it in detail at all and can't remember the visuals of what plants I was tending or what the trees looked like. I can however remember bits and pieces like the nylon hat and seeing the reflection of the man in the water, I can remember working the fields with my hands and a small knife of some sort, I can remember throwing weeds/cuttings into a basket of some sort that someone else seems to pick up and carry.

I remember the field wasn't the same height all over, some parts were new and lower and other parts were growing higher, I remember how quiet it was working the field and that nobody but the old man talked unless they were spoken too. I remember the white man was in a wide brimmed hat and wearing a tank top that didn't look sun weathered or filthy like the others, I remember feeling fear as he walked past and through the field and fear again when I felt myself lose control after looking at the reflection.

I'm not sure what this means or wether it's a one off, it's incredibly unusual for me to dream at all and if I do is usually the same one on the ship and nothing else. Has anyone else experienced visual dreams like this or does anyone have any idea what it could have been or what it was about?

It's normal if I do have a dream to not remember anything at all from it, this time however I have clear memories with no detailed visual imagery I can recall only memories of what I seen and the emotions. I am unsure what it was, my partner thinks it may be a lucid dream or astral projection but I am unsure of what it could possibly be, I am of the opinion I may have somehow slipped into the body of someone in Latin America working in some sort of drug related slave field but I cannot get a clear picture when I couldn't understand what they were saying.

I'm puzzled by the whole thing and looking for ideas/answers of what I can look for to work out what it was, any help is appreciated.

I do not have aphantasia, and I can easily create vivid auditory, visual, and taste sensations inside my head, and I'm really curious about how my experiences in life differ from people with Aphantasia. How does aphantasia affect you personally? Does it extend to more areas of your life than just reading and brainstorming? do you use other tools to help visualize better (drawing, whiteboards, etc)? How does Aphantasia affect your work or school, and how can people like me be more accommodating to people with Aphantasia? I have friends and family that might have aphantasia based on discussions around visualization that we've had, so any information at all about how your experiences might differ from mine would be super appreciated!! If you have any questions for someone with a vivid imagination, I would be glad to answer as well. ;p

My job involves speaking with service users, often for up to two hours at a time. Some of these people are incredibly chatty and will talk my ear off, and one in particular will describe a person or a thing, or even a place in extreme detail because I think they think it adds to the story.

For me, this descriptive conversation means absolutely nothing to me. I can’t visualise what they’re talking about and if I’ve never seen it then I don’t even have a vague sense of what it would look like.

For instance: service user describes his visit to the doctor, explaining that the bus took him on a route down by that park, you know the one with the gate and the little stream [me in my head: I can’t visualise it, don’t know where you’re talking about, this is irrelevant so please just move on]. Then he describes the doctor, who looks like that one actor, you know the one… [me: please just tell me the facts and your views and stop describing!]

This might be niche but it gets so frustrating for me, I tend to just switch off and wait for them to say something relevant so I can be an active participant in the conversation again.

If they’re telling me as account of events where I need to know about the visuals then of course I will listen, but it’s when they’re describing something in order for me to “see” it just because then I just tune out because I can’t bloody see anything.

I’m currently being evaluated for adhd which I do think is heavily influencing this problem for me too.

ETA: I think one comment hit the nail on the head - it’s less to do with the visualising and more that I just don’t care about the irrelevant details. I space out and get bored until the person talks about something that is relevant to the conversation or gives needed and important context.

Me and my partner are both total aphants, gifted, very likely SDAM. We LOVE being super precise in our discussions, and we love meddling with concepts. I wonder if this has anything to do with aphantasia - in the lack of images, we gravitate towards concepts, their relationships, and conceptualizing things. Maybe that's our way of seeing the "bigger picture" when there is no picture whatsoever.
How is your brain experience? Are you also drawn towards concepts, generalizations, etc?

This year I found out I have autism ADHD dyslexia alexithymia echoism and now aphantasia. I guess I have to accept that my brain is messed up. I always wondered why I was so different but was mostly happy with my creativity and out of the box thinking. I only now started to accept my autism because of my lack of social skills. I can no longer pretend to be normal. It really is my brain's fault. The upside is that I no longer have to beat myself up for not trying hard enough.

About two years ago, I went to therapy that isn't like the typical, talking one. It included visualizing. The therapist wanted me to visualize certain stuff. I told her I can't see anything. At all. She still wanted me to try. I knew it was pointless but I tried because I wanted to get better. Nothing happened, of course. All I saw behind my closed eyes was black. "Well, you can imagine numbers, do you?" No, girl. I felt stupid. The visualization was a part of therapy. She told me I would be able to visualize eventually. I've decided to not come back next time.

Reason I went to the therapy was that I have some trauma issues. Do you think the inability to visualise can limit my recovery? Like EMDR works by reprocessing the trauma. Would it be enough to just remember the situations without seeing it?

I can't hold images in my head, I can get a flash of an image but not "hold it" long enough to look at it. I've never seen a doctor or anyone to talk about aphantasia but I feel like I relate to the style of thought being words without images.

I'm a pretty artistic person and I'm wondering if anyone else here is also artistic?

I love to draw and paint but obviously I really struggle to recreate anything in a life-like way. I can't do perspectives or ratios at all and all of my artwork looks deformed and two dimensional and bizarre.

I love to work with colours and I'm pretty great at creating surreal colour palettes, and I also love to work with sculpture because I can sort of see how it should look with my hands. I also really enjoy photography because being able to see how a photograph will look through a lens just makes sense to me.

Can anyone relate? What do you do for artistic expression?

I’m going through a lot right now in my life and I’m trying to stay as calm as possible but it’s super hard! I’m really stressed but I know that if I get extremely stressed all the time every single day that I’ll gain aphantasia because that’s what happened to people here. They go through an extremely stressful event/time in their life and BOOM aphantasia and they usually never recover from it and what’s worse is when someone asks “hey did you ever recover from this?” And they either go “nope” or they ghost them and just never reply…

I just tried to do this vividness test https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq/ and I dont get questions being asked. Like how are you supposed to vividly see something if its not in front of you? There is no light going into your eyes that would recreate that image, and if I close them I see black nothingness. Are there actually people out there that close their eyes and see something as if it was in front of them?

Mi interesiĝas pri la korelacio inter afantazio kaj intereso pri planlingvoj. Ĉu estas ĉi tie samideanoj?

I’m not sure if I have aphantasia or not. I remember details of what things look like, but imagining them altogether as an image is hard. I can never draw things accurately from memory.

Anyway, it doesn’t even matter if I have it. I found this sub and I’m very curious: do hallucinogens work? Like if somebody with aphantasia took shrooms or acid, would they be able to see the visual patterns that many people claim to see when taking these drugs? Or would the aphantasia limit that experience?

So I'm pretty sure I have aphantasia (although I just found out about it yesterday). The thing that's throwing me is how some people seem to describe their relationship to imagination and reading. I actually love reading fiction, and I have a very active/powerful imagination. As a hobby I do ceramics, and I'm able to conceptualize the pieces I want to make in my head before I make them. Like, I can't "visualize" a shape, but I can place the idea of two shapes next to each other and imagine what they would look like... it's just that it's more of an understanding of what it would look like and not an actual picture in my head?

There are a few good ways I've seen describing how I view it:

1. think of it like raw data for a digital photograph or video (in a visual sense, think like the green scrolling 1's and 0's from the Matrix). I'm not actually seeing an image, but I'm thinking about the code for the image and based on that code know exactly what it is I would be looking at if I were seeing it with my eyes.

2. imagine sitting in a large theater, and in front of the stage there is a huge black velvet curtain, and there's a disco ball (which you can't see) shining little spots of light on the curtain. There's a play going on behind the curtain, and you know exactly what's happening in the play. You know what the set looks like, you know what the actors are wearing, where their standing, what their hair looks like, what their facial expressions are... But you're "seeing" all of that through the black curtain. Think Plato's cave allegory, minus the fire. So you just kind of "know" the forms are behind the curtain.

For me at least, even though I don't actually visualize any of what's happening on the stage, the thoughts are actually stand-in's for visuals a lot of the time. So if I'm reading a book, I'm creating a scene in my head, it's just not a visual scene, and weirdly, I know exactly what the scene would look like visually. Like, if someone made a movie of the book later, I can say that's exactly how I imagined it.

Memories are a little weirder. They still appear mostly as a black screen, and I retrieve information from them without "watching" them... But if I try really really hard I can get like a tingle of something that's maybe akin to a photographic negatives in the VERY periphery of my "vision." I can't actually look at it, I can just sort of sense it's there, and understand what is happening in it while it's playing off to the side?

Am I just not understanding what a visualization is? Is what I'm describing pretty normal for aphants?

Hiii

I'm watching all the Harry Potter's movies again, as I like to do pretty often, and I just thought that having a pensieve (an artefact that permits you to relive your memories) could be very practical for us ! That's it just a funny thought, bye guys ;)

I can’t tell if I have sdam or not but I do have multi sensory aphantasia. Only inner monologue and awareness in my mind.

When I go back to “relive memories” it’s like I think about the the details and main points that happened and what I felt. I don’t re-feel anything and if I do feel something it’s because of something new I discovered about the memory or something I forgot but re-discovered after a while or something.

Like if I think about a time I almost drowned. I remember the details in how I felt helpless, what I thought was going to happen, how I was saved and how it changed my friendship and understanding of things etc. I don’t feel anything emotionally unless I come up with new information that I didn’t think of before or that I forgot about. Or maybe if I’m telling someone about it I may feel something.

I can also feel something from a memory if I continuously think about it for a long time but only if it matters to me in the moment or something. I can’t force it. After I’ve entertained a thought/memory long enough, no matter how much I try I won’t feel anything from it anymore.

Idk if this is important but the visual for it I have in my mind is also the same everytime. Like there isn’t a difference in any scene in any way no matter what age when I look back at the memory. I say this because ik some peoples brain may fill in certain things for the unknown in their mind of how things were.

Hello. I’m trying to solve some issues and I’d love your help, but also propose the premise that hyperfantasia and aphantasia may not be real phenomena.

At risk of being superfluous, I’m going to tell you my premise right now:

I don’t believe people with aphantasia understand how we conjure imagery in our minds. Yes, we see whatever we are imagining, but it’s not so much that our surroundings change, we just stop focusing on it, and the image, typically an image of the experience relevant to what was just conveyed, plays in our minds in the form of a memory.

The implications of this means that if you have never seen a red stop sign when I ask you to picture one, you would inherently have aphantasia, except in your cases, you would still know what a stop sign was, and still be able to discuss it, right? You just don’t see it?

But I think you again, mistake how we see it as well. We simply vividly recall the memory. So you don’t recall memories? How do you know they happened? I think you’re seeing it as well, just not as vivid.

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Background, I’m a left handed person with hyperfantasia, and thus I’m very artistic, and use my hyperfantasia to accurately recreate the scenes in my head, which I can freely alter. I’m a musician, song writer, writer of poetry and enjoy all arts.

I also was born with visual snow and synesthesia, so I understand what it’s like to go through life not realizing other people don’t see an endless field of static in front of them or colors in music.

I recently got worried after reading that some people lose hyperfantasia after going under anesthesia. I thought to myself, if I ever lost my hyperfantasia, I’d lose more than my career, but the ability to communicate or think, overall, because I often do when I want to accurately illustrate something verbally.

However, I don’t always do this. Sometimes I communicate without imagining what I am communicating, probably like you.

Either way, I’m scared as someone who might undergo surgery in the future and lose my hyperfantasia. I’ve also lost for a few months after a magic mushroom trip and gained it back after taking a delta 8 weed edible.

I recently learned about aphantasia and was blown away to learn that other people actually "see" images and memories in their mind - I always thought that was a metaphor. Enter new hyperfixation (hi, I also have ADHD).

I've been thinking about how this weaves into my day-to-day life and have a few observations:

• I love taking photos and videos when I travel, go to concerts, etc - and I scroll back through them often. Now that I realize that other people can revisit those memories visually in their mind, I'm realizing why I probably value them more than other people?
• I love home design and think I have a good "eye" for things - but I always need to make a mood board in order to visualize how things come together. I've always been surprised that it wasn't more common to do so - but now I realize people can make mood boards... in their minds?
• I work in a corporate setting & always always use video in my meetings because I find that it's harder to connect & pay attention if I can't see somebody's face. Might be related?
• I love to read, but am always looking for fan art to help me visualize what the characters look like!

What are some of the things that you do in your day-to-day that might subconsciously be helping to compensate for your aphantasia?