Christoph Backhaus

Your findings match what I was able to piece together quite well. My situation is a bit different from what seems to be your experience as a full aphant. I have had a couple of experiences with visualizations in my childhood and now as an adult with some practice. They were even prophantasic. So I have first-hand experience with what they are like. I at the time didn't know what was happening but in retrospect, it is now clear. I clearly recall performing a "Kamehameha" from Dragonball as a teenager and actually seeing a blue flame coming from my hands. Even told my friends about it because I didn't understand that imagery could produce these kinds of effects and thought it was sooo cool. Also what you said about people without inner monologue thinking more in emotions I get too. I have a silent inner monologue. This means that I do "talk" to myself but there is no sensation of audio. But a couple of years ago with quite a bit of meditation training, I was able to completely remove this inner self-talk. For about three months there was absolute silence inside me. The only thing I experienced and thought of was emotions. Absolutely incredible. For instance usually, when I watch movies I'm more of a viewer that is questioning what is happening and trying to understand what is happening. But while without an inner monologue there was no questioning but instead the modality to understand what was happening was experiencing the emotions of the characters on screen. I remember watching "man of steel" on an airplane and crying the whole time because I was feeling this separation between superman and the humans. I was feeling how he was desperately trying to be good and hurt by people being afraid of him. I have met and read now about quite a few ways people think and it is fascinating. One I still can't wrap my head around was someone on Reddit explaining that his thought process functions as a talk show with different anchors. Each with their own opinions and knowledge. If he is faced with a decision the panels discuss it among themself and the consensus is what is put forth. Reading this just blew my mind. There is also something I'm quite worried about. Psychology seems to be extremely undereducated on the subject. During my interviews, I noticed something quite striking. Pych students have had an extreme overrepresentation of aphants. If this does turn out to be not just a fluke there needs to be a lot more education on the topic because they need to be aware that others do not experience imagination like us. I even had one girl who was strongly prophantasic who was undergoing therapy because she was told that her prophantasia was her having schizophrenic hallucinations. Seconds later her friends joined us and almost all of them had the same or close to the same ability. She never thought that others were like her. I even had a psychologist tell me that Phantasia would not exist and what I was describing was impossible... I'm afraid that there might be people out there who believe themself to have a mental illness but are actually just normal. At the same time, I believe that there is huge potential in imagery for therapeutic treatment.   Ps. Would be nice if you had an email list. I moved on from RSS and can't sub to your site like this.

Sure, Steven. 2019 I was mostly focusing on visual abilities. I planned to focus more on the other senses in 2020+ but covid crossed those plans. So for visuals: Removing objects. This means looking at a scene and removing an object/person from their vision effectively making it invisible. "Imagine" it as a mental photoshop. For example, I have a colleague who has a grudge against an ex-colleague and told me he automatically removes that person from pictures where he is present. I tested this ability with my participants and it is extremely common. Not universal but I would say most people with prophantaisa can do it.  Now instead of removing objects some not all (would need to look at my data for percentages so I will stick to abilities in general) were also able to replace. I generally let people replace me with someone else. Exchanging me completely or partly with someone else they know. Sometimes with really funny results when people replaced me with a girl and had trouble removing my at the time lush beard xD Now you know what some women refer to when they say "You were thinking of someone else while having sex" ... Adding objects and persons to a scene is also not a big problem. People will have full-on conversations with these imagined people too. Some being able to hear, touch and smell them as well. Modification is also not uncommon. I usually have them change the color of my clothing. I had one person tell me that he disliked green. So he replaced all green with shades of purple. This also extends to moving objects. I asked them to let me float a little.  Change of perspective. See we as aphants are quite locked to our own perspective but "Try to imagine yourself out of their eyes" is also meant literal. I ask them to imagine looking at us from a floating point in the air. Think GTA. They can do that. Just because they might be looking at you with their eyes does not mean that they are looking from that perspective. Eyes are just one source of input for the creation of their "mind space". They can choose to move in that space. Last but definitely not least stopping time... Yes sound strange but they can. Sure time continues but not for them. They can like a camera slow down what they see and experience it like that. They can also zoom in and out, using mental models to get close to an object. Think standing at the foot of an ant. Seeing it tower ower them. Now I would say in general that if you can say it they can imagine it and then experience it. It might take some time and effort but they mostly can. The only thing I have found they can't imagine is not being able to imagine. Most of the time it is more a lack of having thought of something and less that they can't do it. Like the time stopping. Quite a few had never tried doing it before and were impressed and thought it to be really cool.  What I found quite curious is that my numbers regarding aphantasia and hyperphantaisa are way different from what currently is reported. I don't know why but I found that here where I live around ~11% of people I asked(739 in total. I had more but only had records on those) had a form of aphantaisa. Also, another ~10% were almost aphants and only had visual imagination while reading books but nowhere else. On the other hand, I had around 35% of people who actually were prophantaisics. That is quite a big difference from the 2% number I have now read quite often. No idea why I get such different numbers. My only suspicion is that the VVIQ can be quite confusing for people without having someone explain to them what the questions are actually asking. When I tried to answer them I could clearly spot questions that someone with aphantasia could be confused about and answer differently from what the question is actually asking.What was also quite stunning was the sex difference. Men were almost 10% more likely to have aphantasia (m 15,68% vs w 6,42%). This difference was only really noticeable at the ends of the spectrum with men being about 5% less likely to have prophantaisa. I hope covid will get a bit more under control and I can again do my in-person research. One of if not the best summers of my life.

Great Read! Looks like you also fell deep into this rabbit hole :) I remember when in 2019 I talked about these things on the aphantasia subreddit and people got real defensive. Especially when I talked about prophantasia which I found on my own. I called people that could do it Projectors. Complete blew my mind to hear what people could do with their imagination. It still feels like we life completely different lives. I did an informal survey where I lived at the time and did around 700+ Interviews and most people had either never heard about it or never thought that people could think in a different way from themselves.  I also found a bunch of different types of Phantasia alongside aphantaisa, hyperphantasia, and prophantasia. There are also distinct abilities besides the senses. Asspessialy people with prophantasia can do some really crazy things and I was even able to teach skills I was told about to others.    "Maybe we’re onto something big." What I have been thinking for years now!

Aldous Huxley

I’m 99% non-fiction. I used to read fiction when I was a child but I would say very little and more because I just wasn’t that interested in non-fiction fields yet. Now I enjoy reading a book about psychology or some other field as much as I would watching a movie. The only difference really is that one requires more effort to do. I have a huge backlog of books non-fiction that I want to get through. I find the stories that the real world has to offer are far more exciting than anything someone could come up with.