@agrebanier
Joined almost 4 years agoAlice Grebanier is a retired biochemist. In her mid-thirties, she discovered that, unlike most other people, her mind’s eye was blind. In the 35 years since that surprising discovery, she has given a lot of thought to how her mind manages to work without visualization.
There is an article on the aphantasia network website about hypnopompic images and aphantasia. https://aphantasia.com/article/stories/hypnopompia/ Hypnopompia is the state between sleep and awakening. There is a related state between being awake and falling asleep called hypnagogia. Some people with aphantasia report that they see visual images during these states. Some report that they have dreams with visual imagery. There is a fair amount of variation among people with aphantasia with respect to these experiences, as well as other experiences that may have an association with aphantasia. I, for one, have no visual imagery in dreams or when falling asleep or waking up.
There's an article by Liana Scott elsewhere on this site that describes her similar experiences with the in-between-state from sleep to wakening You might find it interesting: https://aphantasia.com/article/stories/hypnopompia/ I'm an aphant, but I don't have these types of visions. I dream, but without visions. But apparently many people with aphantasia have visual dreams, even though they don't visualize while awake. So, even among people with some traits in common, there is a lot of variability with respect to other traits.
I've seen reference to an article that raises the hypothetical question of aphantasia having a role in diagnosing neurogenerative diseases. However, I'm not sure that any correlation between aphantasia and Alzheimer's disease has actually been established. But there is a paper from Hungary that evaluated distributions of vividness of visual imagery in populations divided into different age groups. You can find a link to a video presentation on the subject as well as a link to the published paper here: https://aphantasia.com/video/aphantasic-with-age/ The paper shows a decrease in vividness of visual imagery between younger and older age groups. This was a population study, not a longitudinal study that followed the same individuals over time to evaluate changes. So there definitely are limitations with respect to providing an answer to your question about whether aphantasia can get worse.
Thank you for your post! Decades ago, I first realized that other people had mental images in a way that I did not. At that time, the word "aphantasia" had not been coined, and I didn't find to much to refer to, but I did talk to people I knew about what I had discovered that was strange about me. I assumed I was not unique, but it took me more than 30 years to interact with anyone else who knew that they did not have visual imagery. The many visualizers I spoke with were somewhat curious about how someone might not be able to visualize. Because visualization was such a large part of their own mental processes, a couple of people wanted to know, if I didn't visualize, how did I think? That question was cause of much introspection on my part. The metaphor I came up with was somewhat like a cross between your description of imagining how your body feels if it were to make a specific movement and your description of imagining yourself as a "black fog of static entity" moving through a space you are trying to map. The metaphor I came up with about how I think is that I feel that I am in a completely black cave, feeling my way, twisting my body into shapes that I might not even be able to actually assume, finding connections that I am not ready to put into words. It's not really a verbal experience, except for brief feelings of "oh that!" or "this could belong with that!" But then, eventually, I feel ready to use my words to describe my thoughts. Perhaps related, when I had difficult technical issues to resolve, I often found it useful to set the problem aside, go for a walk, or maybe for a swim. It seemed as though the physical activity of walking or swimming shook loose some new ideas that eventually bubbled to the surface. So maybe that's why when I'm just thinking, but not moving, I have a sense of mentally moving my body, and most especially my hands, through some completely non-visual space.
You might be interested in an article published on this site a couple of years ago by Melanie Scheer, titled Visualizing the Invisible. She also gave a talk. At the bottom of the article, there is a link to a video of her presentation on YouTube. https://aphantasia.com/article/strategies/visualizing-the-invisible Her focus was on how people experience their own mental imagery. I was struck by the wide range of variability, not just in clarity or vividness of the mental images, but of where they were "seen" (in front of the person, at the back of their head, above their eyes, etc., etc.). We cannot actually get into someone else's mind and experience what they experience, and so we tend to think that other people must be fairly similar to us. I don't visualize, and I realize that my mental experiences are different from most other people in that respect. But I had no idea of how much visualizers may differ, one to another. I would argue that some of the examples you give of visualization may not depend on mental imagery. A drawing is not a mental image, though mental imagery may play some part in how it is created. The drawing is a physical object that anyone who has vision can see. But the process of making a drawing may also depend on having reference objects or photographs to use as a basis. Or, someone who does not have mental imagery (or even someone who does) may make some marks and then respond to what they are seeing as they add more marks to create their drawing. No matter the process, the drawing itself has a physical existence that can be shared with others in a way that mental imagery cannot be. Also, when we can describe or recognize things (a letter, a face, a scene, whatever), that will rely on visual knowledge, and my guess is that the knowledge is the source of mental images that may be generated, not vice versa. I can remember and recognize many things and provide pretty detailed descriptions of them, just as a visualizer might. However, for me, that is never accompanied by any kind of projection into a quasi-sensory mental experience. I just know what things look like without "seeing" them.
I have had a similar experience with the VVIQ. I can't really explain it, but it's almost as if when I close my eyes, my mind shuts down vision-related activity. It's not just the VVIQ, though that was what made me start thinking about this. In general, with my eyes open, I can recall visual details more readily, even though I don't really see anything in my "mind's eye."
The studies on the correlation between aphantasia and prosopagnosia (difficulty recognizing faces) are a bit mixed. But even those studies that indicate a good degree of correlation do not show that everyone with aphantasia also has difficulty with face recognition. The mind is a complex thing, and it may be that you have a better than average ability to map the spatial relationships between facial features and save that information in a retrievable form, linked together with the name and the circumstances in which you met. Perhaps that would explain why you were able to surmise that a stranger might be related to someone you knew. Or maybe there's something else going on in your brain that would explain why you "never forget a face." There are mental phenomena that are often attributed to the ability to visualize, but people with aphantasia can often perform the same tasks, probably by using a different mental "strategy."
There's a really good article by Rebecca McHale, just published on this site (https://aphantasia.com/article/strategies/aphantasia-neurodiversity-and-healing/) that would be a great starting point for your questions about aphants approaching therapy. With regard to your questions about how to answer the VVIQ, I think it's best to remember that it is a completely subjective questionnaire. Your description of how you remember people what people look like sounds a lot like a "1" on the VVIQ, in that you "know" how they look but don't have a picture in your mind. Or maybe a "2" if there is some vaguely visual thing going on in your mind. Either way, you seem to be low on the visualization scale. But really, the VVIQ is just a tool for starting to think about how your mind works with respect to visualization. A 5-point scale can hardly cover the diversity in how different people's minds work.
About visions after surgery: I've seen distinctions made between "voluntary" visual imagery while awake and "involuntary" visual imagery while dreaming while asleep or in the hypnagogic and hypnopompic states between wakefulness and sleep. Many people with aphantasia have visual dreams. I don't, but apparently visual dreams are fairly common, even for aphantasics. The vision system of the brain that is engaged in interpreting what we see (not a problem for aphantasics) is also engaged during visualization, whether while awake or dreaming. Do you have visual dreams? Whether yes or no, it may be that the stresses of the surgery caused you to have with involuntary visions while awake. I'm interested that you describe the post-surgery visions as plaguing you. One of the questions that comes up in discussions of aphantasia is whether aphantasics would like to have the ability to visualize. Some would, but the most common response I've seen is more qualified: yes but only if it can be turned off. If you are not familiar with hypnagogia and hypnopompia, you might be interested in this article on this site: https://aphantasia.com/article/stories/hypnopompia/
I wonder if the dichotomy between mental imagery and propositional thought is an incomplete representation of our mental processes. Why are these the only two possibilities? As a multi-sensory aphantasic, my sense is that there are other modes of "thought" going on in our brains. I was in my mid-thirties when I became aware that other people saw stuff in their mind's eye, while I did not. Before that, I'd had difficulty in various settings when I received specific instructions on what and how to visualize. I often felt frustrated, and nothing good happened. Once I became aware that I was different from most other people, I started handling these types of settings differently. Instead of trying to follow the directions exactly, I knew that I needed to do something a bit different. For example, during years of yoga classes with guided meditations at the end, I didn't try to picture anything. I took the input and thought about what it would feel like to experience whatever the described situation was. These thoughts were neither visual nor propositional. Other than the external words, few words and often none at all came into my mind. I just followed my feelings. When I didn't feel like following along with the prompts, I simply focused on how I was feeling in the moment, both physically and emotionally. For me, that does not require images or words, unless someone else asks me to describe what is going on. In order to engage other people more fully in these types of practices, it might be helpful for the practitioners to start from a broader set of instructions. Start with "thought" rather than "visualization" or other quasi-sensory modalities. We all think, even if we don't know exactly how we do it. Individuals can explore what that means for them. Maybe for most it involves visualization or other sensory imagination. Maybe for others it involves words. Maybe for others it is something else entirely different. If there is direction needed, it should start with how the individual can use their understanding of their thoughts to get to the next point of the practice. We don't know what other people's internal experiences are. It was reasonable for the author of this article to ask his daughter if she might experience more helpful results from HeartMath freeze-frame if she were using a mind's eye. But I think it would have also been reasonable for him to inquire if she felt that she got more quickly and fully to a helpful state because she wasn't distracted by visualization. Who is to say what the best route is for a helpful practice if a helpful result is achieved?
To answer Daisy's question : "how can you think about tip jars next to cash registers without some degree of visualization somewhere?" I wouldn't use the word visualization to describe anything that doesn't actually involve seeing something in your mind's eye. My imagination is spatial, not visual, and I don't think visualization is necessary to my imagination. I could even argue that, since a major use of vision itself is to help us navigate 3-dimensional space, visualization in someone's mind's eye is often related to some more fundamental spatial knowledge. Most of the evidence I've seen is that, when compared to the general population, people with aphantasia are not deficient in their sense of spatial relationships. We just have a different route to get through tasks that seemingly rely on visualization, at least from the perspective of visualizers. There are some interesting articles on this site about how much variability there is in how visualizers picture things in their minds eye. It's not one thing. For example: https://aphantasia.com/article/strategies/visualizing-the-invisible/ People with aphantasia may also have very different types of internal imaginations from each other, so I don't pretend to speak to anyone else's experience. This all may be a semantic distinction without much meaning. I can imagine where things are in space in relationship to each other and to me if I imagine myself to be in the same space. I can imagine properties of things that I do not imagine seeing. It's as though I have all of the information available to me that I would need to create some kind of mental visual image, but, since I don't do that, I don't think what goes on in my mind is at all the same as visualization, or even some kind of pre-visualization. I might as well ask, what happens in a visualizer's mind before their vision appears? Maybe it is similar to what happens in my mind, but maybe not.
How do we access the meanings of words? Great question! I'm not sure we can down to the root of the matter, since there are a lot of unconscious processes going on in our brains all the time. Let me start with your own description for the word "tip", which you describe as as an impression, which would be a picture, except that you have aphantasia. My experience might be similar (or not), except that I would describe tiny motions, such as the slight tilt of my head to one side when I read the text asking for an explanation of what went on in my mind as I thought of the meaning of "tip". I became much more aware of the role of small muscular contractions in my thinking when I first became aware that I had no mind's eye, about 35 years ago. I learned that, if I wanted to stay quiet, it was a good idea for me to sit on my hands. No hand motion, fewer words...but that may just be me. You may not experience anything like that at all. Then, since the right side of my computer screen showed a hat for sale (Aphantasia Merch!), I thought of the phrase, "to tip one's hat" which has both literal and figurative meanings. Associated with that came the sense of what it would be like to lift my hand to grasp the brim of a hat. And then, I thought about tip jars next to registers, and I wondered about why "tipping" means adding something extra to payment for service. No images, and no muscle movements either, for that one. Just a sense of where tip jars are generally located in commercial establishments, as well as where you add a tip on a credit card slip. So this last meaning was mostly associated with spatial relationships. My guess is that all of these impressions or even visualizations come after the mind has already accessed the meaning of the word, and that those manifestations are just a possible means of bringing that into consciousness, for words that are amenable to that kind of process. How would you manifest a more conceptual word, such as "inconceivable"? What would a visualization or impression even be? But I know the meaning of the word, and you probably do as well. So there have to be other processes involved in accessing the meanings of words, even if we aren't conscious of them.