Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

Reality and Spectrum of Mental Imagery

• Many participants strongly affirm aphantasia is real; others express doubt or suspect miscommunication about what “seeing in the mind” means.
• Experiences are clearly on a spectrum: from complete absence of imagery to extremely vivid “hyperphantasia” that can feel like AR or movie-quality scenes.
• Several note different “planes” of imagery: some can superimpose on vision, others only in a separate inner space.

How People Experience Thinking

• Aphantasic participants describe:
  • No pictures when prompted (e.g., Mona Lisa, STOP sign, pink elephant).
  • Access only to concepts, words, spatial or logical relations.
  • “Knowing” shapes, routes, or schemas without any visual feel.
• Hyperphantasic participants describe:
  • Detailed, manipulable 3D scenes, sometimes with sound and mild tactile sense.
  • Strong daydreaming, intrusive imagery, difficulty reading because visuals dominate.
• Some report strong audio imagery but no visuals; others have neither images nor internal monologue, only “concepts.”

Impact on Work, Reasoning, and Daily Life

• Many with aphantasia report:
  • Little impairment in technical fields; strong abstract or spatial reasoning (math, physics, programming, navigation).
  • Reliance on diagrams, CAD, notes, and conceptual/graph-like models instead of mental pictures.
  • Difficulty with drawing from imagination, recognizing or describing faces, and following image-based directions.
• Some hyperphantasic people find their vivid imagery distracting or emotionally intense.

Dreams and Other Senses

• Mixed reports:
  • Some aphantasics dream vividly and only see images in sleep.
  • Others have non-visual or “book-like” dreams, or few/no recalled dreams.
• Several can vividly imagine sounds, music, and sometimes taste/smell, even when visual imagery is absent.

Memory and SDAM

• Multiple comments mention severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM): remembering life as facts, not replayable episodes.
• People describe weak recall of mundane details (e.g., breakfast, movie scenes) and poor episodic “re-living,” sometimes linked to aphantasia and possibly to depression.

Testing, Diagnosis, and Debate

• VVIQ (imagery vividness questionnaire) and simple prompts (imagined scenes, triangles with color, “ball on a table” questions) are discussed, but many find them too subjective.
• Objective signals mentioned: pupil response to imagined brightness, fMRI differences, visual memory tasks.
• Disagreement over whether many self‑diagnoses reflect true aphantasia versus high standards or semantics.
• Some discuss training methods (e.g., “image streaming”), meditation, or post‑Covid changes, but effectiveness and mechanisms remain unclear.