Do you have aphantasia? 

Wait, people can actually imagine what things taste smell and feel like? I thought sight was the only thing anyone could do. Man, I’m missing out more than I thought.

I literally cannot tell if I'm picturing something. I know what things look like, but I cant really feel like I can see them together. I know what a palm tree is supposed to look like, I know what water and sand are supposed to look like, and I know what a beach looks like, but I can only think of what I know it looks like. Idk if I can picture it or think of it. Is that weird?

I can't follow guided meditation, and i can't hold an image in my mind. I always thought it meant i couldn't concentrate. I have tried to meditate for years and have never mastered this issues.

Thank god I found this video, the red star test has shattered me and made me cry for hours thinking I'm missing out on a core part of being human. Even worse, I'm an artist and I always thought my imagination was strong & strange- I just couldn't physically see anything. I still struggle a lot with visualisation, I can't rotate things or zoom very well but knowing the nuanced difference has settled me down so so much. legit was thinking 97% of ppl are prophantasic. omg.

When my eyes are open i can kind of see images and memories as if they were running in a background process, but If i close my eyes I can't see anything at all (in my mind or on my eyelids). And if I ever try to focus on any part of these images I can't whatsoever. It's kind of like there's a sense of them being there, but not at the same time. It's so hard to explain but it's like I'm at least aware of what they look like?

I have aphantasia, and ever since I learned I do, it's made me really sad every time I think about it. I thought only seeing black when I closed my eyes was normal, and I used to get really confused whenever my teacher told my class to close our eyes and imagine something. I never saw the point, I thought it was just a weird thing people told me to do so I could concentrate on my thoughts better. Probably won't tell anyone, they wouldn't believe me anyway.

Thanks for clearing things up. I not only have aphantasia, I have it 5 times! Yay!

I have very very weak visual (I can only see places I’ve been and if I focus it goes away) but almost perfect sounds

This is fantastic. Thank you so much for this video and all you learned and practiced and worked on to make it. 💜

I was the 900 subscriber!! Yay. Thank you for this video!

definitely helped to clarify completed understand. I'm regular Phantasia, and have had very few awesome moments of hyperphantasia while reading a book, or driving and forgetting about the ride completely and finding myself farther towards my destination.

Great content! Recently before dozing off and with my eyes closed, I see vivid images like prophantasia. And I notice this and wonder to myself whether my eyes are open or closed. The moving images are very detailed and with color. So I RU-vidd it to develop it further and that's how I arrived at your channel.

Here from Reddit, been looking around on the internet for an hour now about aphantasia and con confirm that I don't have it. Thank you

I'm aphantasic and I decided to follow your tips from now on; while I don't become hyperphantasic literally, I begin this excercises by imagining myself as a hyperphantasic already.

Amazing video! Super helpful!

Finally someone did this! Nice job man, thanks. I have been imagine streaming for about a week and I suppose thats a practice for prophantasia. Slight improvements did happen but nothing too big yet.. Maybe you could make a video on what you were doing for hyperphantasia and prophantasia?

I feel like I was trying to reach some form of Aphantasia when I meditate, turns out people are born with it, Fascinating.

Very informative video! Thanks for clearing things up. By the way, can you make a video explaining how exactly you developed prophantasia and hyperphantasia? Improving my visualization skills would be very useful as an artist.

THANK YOU for this video. I worried that I have aphantasia, but when you explained what each ability is, I now understand that I am more hyperaphantasiac. I can visualize in color and detail, but cannot project an image to the black screen of my eyelids. It's like recalling/remembering scenes. I was always confused when people would describe vivid visualization and thought that I had to physically see images on the back of my eyelids. It's a relief knowing that I do not have aphantasia, though I am very interested in developing prophantasia.

Thank you for explaining this so clearly. I've been able to get glimpses of things in my head and sometimes very vividly, but I can't access the imagery and I can't manipulate it. It's as you describe it, I'm effectively blind to it. I can see evidence that I'm generating visuals because when I'm drawing, the perspective is often times far too good to be explainable without visulization being involved, but I can't see what I'm drawing until after it's nearly done. Anybody watching me draw will know what I'm drawing when I do, I just have a vague sense of the elements I'm going to have in the picture and where they're going to be located.

When I try to see an image with my eyes closed I cannot bring any to fruition. Instead I feel like im flipping through the ideas of memories or references of the image, as if i know what it looks like from experience, but still just darkness. Aphantasia?

This is wild as I used to visually hallucinate things while staring at my ceiling while thinking, as a kid. I didn't know it was at all desirable. As an adult I have lost some of this but can still easily picture things in what you call the "minds eye" Nikola Tesla was said to be a master of this, even working on engineering things and troubleshooting, in his own head. Very neat stuff and thanks for the video.

According to the definitions given in the video, I have been prophantasic for the majority of my life, and I'm somewhere between phantasic and hyperphantasic... Thanks for giving definitions and terms to these things!

I just stumbled upon this subject and realized that I used to have prophantasia as a kid. For example, I used to imagine vivid animals running next to our car so I wouldn't be bored. I can't do that anymore and I don't know when I lost the ability. For a couple of years I have practiced imagining things more vividly in my mind because I want to get better mental images of the characters in my stories. Amazing to know some terms about this now! I think I'm on my journey between phantasia and hyperphantasia: I can imagine very vividly but I still struggle to keep up the bigger picture when I concentrate on the details. When I concentrate on the face the shirt might get blurred, for example. Thank you for this video!

This video gave me a context to what it is not and answered that no, I do not have it. I can mentally visualize my cat, in full vivid description though I see (visually with my eyes) nothing but my eyelids. All other sources have been incredibly fuzzy and vague and made me think that I had it because I could only visually see my eyelids with my eyes closed. Thank you for this explanation of what aphantasia is not.

This video almost made me cry. I never knew that there was an actual term for this!! I literally have FOMO when it comes to imagination.

So I have aphantasia, and I can't feel, smell or see in my thoughts. But I can hear!! I'm so happy I have at least one sense, It makes me so happy that I can just play a song in my head!! And it's a very strong sense too. I think I first "found out" about aphantasia when I learned how to speak to myself in my head, I told my sister and she was like "yeah, I can do that too. But I prefer to see stuff, it's more fun" and I kept asking her questions, we were about 4 and 5 at the time, so she had a hard time explaining it. She said "just close your eyes, and act like you're at the beach" and I just couldn't. I was so confused, then at 9 I had seen some videos but couldn't quite understand the concept. Now, I'm 14 and realize everyone's mind is different, and I'm just glad I have a voice in my head.

Fascinating to hear explained. I think I may have some degree of aphantasia. When trying to "visualize" an apple I don't "see" any shape at all, but I have a very vague sense of how it should look like. But it is more conceptual/abstract than visual. As in I can't actually imagine any specific image of an apple. To get anywhere close I would have to "trace out" the outline of the shape consciously, but even then it doesn't "stick" and fades away if I don't actively focus on tracing it. The same goes for faces. I don't have any problem recognising faces when I see someone, but if I think of them I still get no image. If I again consciously focus on the "idea" of their face I can classify pieces of information as eye color, if they have any wrinkles, how they smile, etc. But this is again not in any visual form but rather as ideas connected to the idea of the face of that makes sense. The same goes for feel, taste and smell. No matter how hard I try I can't imagine the taste of chocolate or the smell of tea etc, but I still have a vague collection of ideas/abstractions connected to each concept. When it comes to sound it is a bit different for me. I still can not spontaneously imagine a sound in my head that continues without my conscious focus. But if I focus on it I can create some version of the sound by speaking or singing or making the sound of the instrument in my mind. But to this I have to focus on creating the sound, and if I stop focusing on it it dissapears. As such I have never had a song or melody "stuck in my head" as I've heard it described. Is this possibly aphantasia? I find ot weird that I haven't really noticed this difference before recently as I've enjoyed reading, especially fantasy, my whole life. But it makes sense how when I was for example reading ASOIAF I always loved to look up illustrations or at pictures from the GOT TV show to fix my vague idea of a character or place to an actual picture, as I didn't really generate this picture myself. I think this "defect" has ironically lead me to enjoying more descriptive litterature as it gives my mind more information to work with when recreating the sequence of events.

I love some of my memories bc of hyperfantasia, but it's also crippling when I temeber trauma it's like reliving it.

Oh wow, finally i find what I’ve been looking for after days, thank you for the explanation. I couldn’t understand what it meant to “see” in the mind at all, because I don’t see anything anywhere, I just feel the image in the back of my mind, I don’t see it but I feel it, and now I know that’s phantasia, just not prophantasia. I described my thoughts as “the negative of a photograph” or the “negative space” of something. Like I don’t see the apple, but I feel the space an apple occupies, not with any details, mainly it’s like a negative of something as representation of its most basic semantic features. Another example I found was thinking about a ball rolling off a table, while apparently some people thought about the material and size of the table and the color of the ball (my mom saw a round wooden table and a ball with many colors - she might have hyperphantasia), all I had was the “feel” of them, and the space of a ball (round, small) over the space of a table (flat surface, legs) in the back of my head. But that’s still like, a vaguely sense of sight, a rudimental visual representation I guess. Thank you again!

so I have aphantasia,too. despite the bitterness of this truth, there's something good about,I recently learned to name. I am not alone that's a relief

Nice work good communication skills!

This video was actually exactly what I needed. I have a friend who I now think is prophantasiac who was trying to figure out if I have aphantasia by describing what he sees. I wasn't understanding it at all, so we were thinking I had aphantasia. Nop. Pretty sure I'm just a regular old phantasiac without prophantasia. Thanks!

This is enlightening, personally I never use smell feel or taste in my imagination but I have no problems when I try it out, very vivid. My daydreams sometimes seem just as vivid as my actual dreams. Visual is my highest and I've also worked on it so my detail recreation in my mind's eye seems like a parity of the real world. Auditory is always there, I use it to talk in my head and recalling music lyrics all the time. My family's genetics has issues with mental illness and diabetes(type 1) which I have had hard encounters with by the age of 20, I want to say there is some sort of correlation there since hyperphantasia is commonplace but don't have any data to back that up. In an unhealthy state I have had chaotic hallucinations from all my senses inducing paranoia, this mainly came from ignoring my needs for sleep and a terrible diet. If you're familiar with the Jungian functions this might be correlated with introverted intuition. I would classify myself as MF Ni/Te BSCP. Also, I want to say my thoughts feel like they come from around my physical head, not necessarily in it.

15:34 i didn’t even know that was possible... i seem to be missing out on a lot

I’m hyperphantasia, when I imagine things I’m gone, I totally go into my thoughts with all the senses. You talked about when people close their eyes they see black. I only sometimes see black, usually I see colors, usually with a black background but not always. Beautiful colors that can’t even really be described because I’m not sure they exist. They are fluid colors, there’s variation to the colors and they move around. I not only vividly see the colors but I also feel them too. Anyone else have this?

I could listen to u talk all day

I'm still so confused... I can detail an object but can't exactly imagine it.... Like colours, I can say the colour, like easy, I know that colour, like green is green. But I can't see it. If you were to ask me to describe green, I just can't do it. Only words are green. Is this just phantasia? ALSO- People can smell, taste, and feel things....😕😕 Hearing I got, but really people can smell, taste AND feel things in their imagination?!?

I like to imagine things with my eyes open and just in my head not paying attention to physical reality, but going through my thoughts. Images are vague unless I'm really relaxed and focusing on where the third eye would be and visualizing by feeling this imaginary eye opening as though it really was. Usually when the images start to get strong I fall asleep or start to feel it happening and snap out of it, but the black of my eyelids has often faded away to blue skies, but only when intentionally trying or actually dreaming.

A comment I saw on another video described what I see perfectly. If you go into a dark room with little to no light, and stick you hand out in-front of you, you can’t see it with light... like I just kinda feel it mentally. Like I know it’s their and see it without seeing it. Same if you move you hand around. I don’t see color at all and I don’t see anything in fact, but I know what I’m seeing without seeing if that makes sense.

I definitely did the mistake of going down the rabbit hole of reading countless of blogs on the internet. Reddit definitely was the main source that confused me to the point of amping up my already bad anxiety hahaha. I even convinced myself for a minute that I had aphantasia because the red star test confused me so much. But this video helped clarify and take away some of my anxiety. I’m pretty sure now that I have regular phantasia and I may have even underestimated my visualization ability. I can remember memories and videos I watched really well and replay them in my head. I also sometimes even do tours of places that I’ve been to many times. I see colors, but because it’s in my mind, I sometimes get confused if I even see them. I definitely don’t see anything physically with my eyes, but it feels like I’m having a visual thought in the back of my brain. It’s really hard to explain but I think this is what phantasia is (at least I hope so). Only thing which still confuses me until this day is that I can visualize with my eyes open way better than when I have them closed. Maybe it’s just a focus problem, as my thoughts start to wander or my focus starts shifting to the back of my eyelids.

So, okay. I’m a very artistic person. I draw all the time, watch tons of Media, read tons of books, and create my own stories. Using the Apple thing, here’s my experience, as in depth as I can make it. 1. Very simply, I can imagine the Apple, standing alone in space. I don’t physically see it imprinted on my eyelids when I close my eyes, nor do I see it anywhere with my eyes open. It his there however. There is no outline, no colour, but it is there. 2. If I begin to focus more and more and distract myself from the fact that I cannot physically see it with my eyes, it becomes clearer. Outline, vague sense of colour, yet I’m not sure if I can actually see the colour or not, but I can picture 2 apples side by side, one green, one red, and distinguish the two. 3. I can move the Apple around and it will seem like it is moving if I’m focused and distracted, though typing this and thinking, not very distracted, it’s still going on simultaneously, I’m just not focusing on the image aspect. 3. I can imagine someone in 3D, hair, eyes, face shape, freckles or not, super detail, holding the Apple. Do they have gloves? Yeah, they do now. They’re metal, and have ridges. Now it’s a guy, and he’s a knight. Eating the Apple. 4. I can now picture a woman running up to him and saying something urgently to knight guy holding my Apple. I can now think of how this woman sounds, and what she’s saying at the same time as I’m typing this as well. NONE OF THIS IS IN COLOUR. 5. I can suddenly sense that I’ve decided it’s a cold winter day. I cannot feel this, but I can imagine the 2 characters shaking ever so slightly, and the paleness of their skin from the cold, and the snow gently falling, the snow their feet reside in. 6. I can now imagine them running off together towards something in the distance I am actively creating. It’s a castle in the distance. 7. The man has now tripped on a loose stone in the bridge that connects where they are standing to the castle, which under it is a deep Pit of nothingness, fog dispersing around it as the man is looking down, my eyes now his. 8. I’m back in third person. The man has caught himself on the railing. I’m now aware of what I’ve pictured him in but not mentioned to myself directly, which is a metal helmet with a red feather I can now see as red, the metal silver as I’m typing this, though these colours are not ACTUALLY able to be seen anywhere, as I am looking at my screen. 9. I now look up from my screen, (typing this in pieces) and see the knight at my door, his hand on it and a panicky look on his face, and I know this expression is because he is confused, and he must get back to the woman and to the castle. The man looks at me and walks up to me, currently on my bed laying down and typing on my phone. He gets pretty close to my face, I can see his freckles clear with my own eyes, YET. He nor they actually appear in my vision. No outline, no colour. But I can still somehow mentally see him as if he is there. I can imagine him breathing, the sound of him breathing, and the warmth of his breath, though I cannot actually feel the warmth. So.... Where do I stand then?

Very interesting video, I've had a very active imagination since I was a child, my aunt thought I had schizophrenia, I always thought something was wrong with me, I know I have profantasia, I stare at a picture with a straw in my hand for hours on and in deep concentration, I tried to stop but i just cant help it, it's good to know there was a answer

Huh. I definitely think I'm prophantasic but my eyes don't need to be closed. I'm sitting here painting, listening to this video and going on brain adventures which are beautifully described by you as like VR experiences. I can eat/drink etc too

I can imagine anything with my eyes open actually but not closed. my visual is still like far away from what i want to imagine. i mean that the scenes i imagine in my head are like transparent and feels… unpresent in my head but somehow still are here inside my head. i hope im not alone.

When you meant by seeing in the mind's eye, is it like visualising how you see in vivid dreams? Not physically seeing but sort of like imagining you are dreaming?

Thanks for the vid. It was very informative! I think I'm somewhere between Hyperphantasia and Prophantasia... I'm able to delve into the latter if I'm either sleepy enough, or if I get into some deep guided meditation, but it's not something I can control at will. I'll be honest though, while it sounds interesting on paper, it's a nightmare for an illustrator like myself. I always "see" how I want things to be done, but my hand just refuses to ever live up to my expectations (Though that might just be general artist thing). In terms of Hyperphantasia, I use music to help set a "mood" in my head, which allows me to recall senses from something I've previously experienced. Without a catalyst, however, I often just get static.

I am definitely fighting with aphantasia. About the only thing I *can* experience in my thoughts is an overwhelming jukebox. All other “sense” are currently nil, except if I’m dreaming. I can recall having experienced vivid dreams, but am not currently able to recall them back to mind. Recollections are conceptual and verbal, so I can recall how I would describe something but it’s like you would describe a picture to someone who can’t see what you’re looking at. It was definitely a shock when I found out that wasn’t the standard. 😂

I really don't understand how one cannot visualise. This is a phenomenon that is new to me. I thought it was necessary, automatic and a consequence of natural interaction with the world. Personally, I can visualise things very clearly, the objects themselves and their dynamic physical and spatial interactions. It makes no difference whether I close my eyes or not. I would say my touch visualisation is much more vivid, immediate and ever present and provides the function as if one were blind and uses touch to 'see' the world around them. In terms of imagining, its effectively my primary sense with sight being second. My visuals and touch are inextricably linked, so much so that if I'm just looking at things around me I'm also feeling every detail as if I were physically touching it, whether its an object close to hand or a tree in the distance. I can touch things in my minds eye as if it were real, objects such as an apple, its shape, its waxy texture, biting into its crisp interior, etc, or running my hands on over an imagined landscape scene, touching the trees, mountains, etc. Same with sound. Taste and smell are more vague, and only relate to strong smells like coffee, flowers, pine resin, etc, such that I can at least differentiate between them. Same applies to sharp tastes like lemons. As a kid I was often accused of daydreaming in class or at least not paying attention to a boring lesson and I would drift off imagining other things... 😉 As I said, I really thought that what I experience is what everyone else experiences without exception and although I was aware of an amount of variation such that one could be deemed more of a "visual" person or a "language" person, this Aphantasia is a complete and utter mystery to me... 🤔

i can’t even see in my dreams, my memories and my memories of my dreams are hard to describe, it’s just i know what i’m doing or had done, so like i know what’s happening but i can’t see it ever, and i can’t audiate either. i’ve never smelled or heard or tasted or felt physically ever when dreaming or anything, just know and process what’s happening and what i’m doing and other people are doing

This was very informative! I'm in the process of trying to figure out if I have aphantasia and this has helped. Currently I'm not really sure if I do because of some of this information. But the way I "visualize" is by shaping it with my mind. It's weird but the best way I can describe it is like a artist who had sight but now is blind. As they try to make an apple out of clay they use what they know about apples to do it. They shape it with the knowledge that apples are normally circular and have bumps on the bottom. They are able to think of ways to describe the apple but they mold it without seeing it. That's what it feels like to think. I think about characteristics of an object or try and mold my thoughts into the shape of an object using what I know. I think maybe I am tricking myself because I KNOW what it looks like and I FEEL like I can see it but that;s just because I am thinking about it. That reminds me of back before I knew about it and had to sit through a guided meditation. I got bored because it was all "visualize a tree with a bird on it" and "visualize you taking deep breathes". I remember thinking thoughts like "wow, she acts like we're supposed to see something. The tree is brown there is a blue bird in it my breathing is slow. Can we be done, I can't see anything so why does it matter?" I've since (obviously) found out about aphantasia and I'm still not sure if I have it. Sidenote: I can dream really vividly and I remember once when I was younger I woke up from a dream but could still see it happening even though my eyes were open and it had ended. It only lasted for a few seconds but I still wonder if that was what it was like to visualize.

After reading the report "The neural correlates of visual imagery vividness - An fMRI study and literature review", I decided to check for myself whether the dimness of image in the head changes if I try to intentionally place it in different parts of the head; in the frontal part, in the occipital and in both temporal right and left. The results were as follows: When trying to place a mental image in the frontal part (exactly what I always tried to do), the result was completely ordinary : I close my eyes - something obscure in the fog and immediately darkness. When trying to place the image in both temporal areas, I saw just a steady darkness. But now, an attempt to place the image in the back of the head gave two interesting effects: 1. the image lasted several times longer than in the first case; and its degree of opacity began to vary quite significantly , as if controlled by a dimmer ; 2. there was a feeling that the image h as retired a longer distance. What does this mean - it is worth asking professional people.

Weird-I have no visual sense of imagining things at all-things just get stored as words/idea threads/associations. In school teachers would occasionally do guided meditations and it drove me NUTS and felt not at all relaxing to try to do them because I absolutely could NOT. So I guess I’d probably be aphantasic in a visual sense? But I am DEFINITELY hyperphantasic and prophantasic for sounds. Which on one hand, it makes learning musical pieces pretty easy (and let me get away with some SLACKING on practice in college without getting yelled at by my teacher or accompanist), but damn can it be annoying when it WON’T TURN OFF to the point of disrupting my sleep-or making it hard to understand people speaking to me over my brain cranking Marcello’s concerto in C minor. It’s also nice to have some words for this because people have gotten concerned that I’m hallucinating when I’ve complained about music stuck in my head being too loud. People are not reassured if I say that hallucinations are different-they are not distinguishable from normal sensory stimuli. Well, not distinguishable other than by *content*. The zigzag lines and streaking and flashing and other migraine aura weirdness is pretty obviously not an accurate interpretation of visual stimuli present even though my visual cortex is interpreting those things as normal. And the hypnagogic hallucinations are BIZARRE and feel extremely real, but unless I’m super out of it they don’t tend to get me because I know they’re just hallucinations and the product of my sleep disorder and can be safely relegated to the category of “obnoxious shit my nervous system does because my nervous system is A Mess”. I also wonder if not being able to picture things in my mind’s eye is why I’m absolute garbage at describing my migraine aura outside of the stereotypical but atyptical-for-me zigzag lines and blind spots? Because I can’t picture it when I don’t have it (and when I have it my focus is not on taking notes of what I’m seeing because migraines are awful)? If other people describe their auras I’ve had some described that I’m like “YES I get that too!” but I CANNOT give a description of the visual components of auras on my own. I can just say that I do get them.

now this makes more sense

Thank you.

I think I have regular phantasia for sight but I can't at all imagine touch or smell or taste, didn't even know that was possible. I have a really good audio imagination though, if I remember it I can re-listen to a song in my head, and I can mentally speak using my own or even other people's voices. It's pretty useful I think as someone who wants to be a voice actor.

Thank you. It is really fascinating to learn that people process stuff differently. I guess I am mostly hyperphantasia (and I'm an artist) with a lean toward prophantasia, however, the prophantasia I have no control over, so is that technically prophantasia in the way you describe?. For example I went through a period of creating a person with my imagination. I gave him a name and a certain look. One day, he randomly popped into my head without any prompting from any source. He was so hyper real and detailed in the way that I couldn't make up using will power alone. Interestingly, there was another 'layer' to the visuals and that was that he was also made of fabric, kind of like a patchwork (hard to describe, he was both a patchwork and a real person at the same time). I thought that was even more interesting, because he was a fabrication of my own imagination. Does anyone else relate to this?

Cover your palms with your eyes open, make sure no light seeps through & that’s what I see when I close my eyes. I cannot voluntarily imagine any visual data or audio. When I’ve done copious amounts of drugs, I’ve closed my eyes & had some data but it’s debatable whether or not, that’s voluntary because it’s an outside source. My sober attempt to experiencing voluntary imagination is breath work for 1-2hr, which gave me color & slight movement idk it was hard & difficult. I haven’t practiced breathwork in awhile I’ve been discouraged at all my attempts but I haven’t given up just letting burn out play out so I can come back with more energy stronger & ready than ever!

I beleive I may have this although I do want to be hopeful and look further into it. I just learned all my family members can "see everything I cant not. I realised today why I didn't read a single fiction book from age 11 and just so so may things...even taste and colours, it's a little overwhelming to come to a relisation that your literally"in the dark" compared to everyone else and there levels of imaginary perception of sight, taste and smell, sound

I've never been able to visualise, at best I get the vaguest impression. I can however play music in my head and it's almost as good as hearing it, and replay conversations etc. When my daughter was young however she used to draw things by putting the pen on the paper and drawing all the way round the outline like a plotter. Better than I could ever draw. When we asked her about it she said she was just drawing round what she could see.

I have a mix of all of them... Sometimes it's hard to visualise anything, sometimes it's vague and occasionally it's super vivid. As a kid I think I could visualise a bit normally, been seeing vague for as long as I could think of but I've been practicing for some mo ths now and I occasionally switch

I beleive artists must have a vivid minds eye

I asked my mother and sister today about their inner sight. They see everything in vivid detail down to colors and patterns. I see vague blobs so thought “yep I’m Aphantasic” but from your descriptions I may be normal and they are the weirdos ( contrary to their rude questions on my planet of birth! “ ) they May have hyperphantasia. I know what things look like but can’t see a whole picture or it’s not detailed. I have a sense of what it looks like. People are very vague and well blob like - even my wife of 20 years ( I got in trouble for that one - wives don’t like being called a blob! ) Eg My car I know well but I see a general non colored ( b&w maybe) image of a car sitting in my driveway with objects I know are around it. But to see detail I need to “move” around my car in my mind and sort of fill in the details that I know. The tow bar sized dent in the side , the branch shaped scratch on the roof. It’s almost like I’m having to draw it in in my mind. Then after Ive filled in the details, it’s a slight bit more vivid but still no color or nice picture of it.

I thought everybody can't visualize image Clearly,because all I see I black when I close my eyes. This is so fascinating

I can see, taste smell and touch in my mind.

so recently i saw this thing called the red star test and if you couldn’t see the star, which i couldn’t, it was said that you had aphantasia. but like if i read a book before it comes out as a movie and then go watch the movie, i can be like “oh that’s not what i thought the character would look like” so now i’m confused as to if i have aphantasia or not

Hi There! Thanks a lot for this video, helped me a lot! I have to ask, you say that these abilities can be grown, but how? Thanks again that was really helpful

So could having prophantasia almost be like when you look at a light and you can still see it when you close your eyes? Or is it more or less visual or way different ?

Thank you so much

I can very vaguely see a 2D apple if I was to close my eyes but can visualize faces no matter how well I know their face.

If I'm thinking about what to have for dinner, and I think pizza, I know my thought are coming from my head. But, I can't see the pizza. Can I really call that dark black void in my mind for a pizza?! When you ask me to visualize a something, I feel like I can't! But what makes this so difficult to understand for me, is that I do have the blueprint of everything I try to imagine, which is why I feel like maybe I do visualize something in my mind after all! However, allthough the blueprint is there, I can't say it's available in a visual way. It's like having it behind a no-see-through glass wall. The blueprints I have for anything I try to imagine is there though so I have a sense of what is going on. I'm fully swimming in the ocean, collecting shells on the beach, having an icecream. It's like, even if I can't visualize in my mind my own room, I still know where everything in my room is located when I close my eyes. I have a memory, but minus any visual imagery. There's nothing wrong with my ability to make up stories in my mind. But at the same time, where is actually the ocean, the beach, my icecream?! Trying to imagine a mountain is nothing but a big black screen with nothing. Maybe it's more like feeling rather than visualizing, remembering how something would feel like? I sometimes feel I have a sense of shape and movement. I feel as if I see a smiling face, a laughing face, someone dancing. But again, everything just feels like a black void, where is everything, actually? I know I rely a lot on inner dialogue, or else there would just be a darkness going on in my mind. It's easier to imagine doing something with an inner dialogue, although inner dialouge does not help even having an extremely vague sense of visual imagery. Maybe my brain have learned to imagine things in a non-visual way, but it feels like visualizing somehow? I at least have no idea what it means to actually visualize something in my mind, I try so hard to understand what is going on in my mind, so hard to try see anything, or trying to understand what is actually having a minds eye is like. Even if people try to explain Aphantasia and visual imagery, I'm still as confused as ever 😭 I have a feeling I'll never figure out if I have Aphantasia or just incredible bad vizualization skills!

Thanks for the great explanation!

That's interesting, I didn't know you can work on prophantasia. I think I may have it, I do see things as if my eyelids were a TV screen, but I can't really control what I see, the images just "start happening". Or my favorite is when I close my eyes, sometimes my eyelids "disappear" and I "still see" my room. This is actually kind of comforting when I have a hard time falling asleep.

i cant visualize anything i cant imagine things, i still have memories but no more than words

Occasionally when I imagine a scent I start to smell it in real life. I would say that my mind's eye is sometimes very vivid but I have no concentration so I'm not great at visualizing!

I have a question you can hopefully answer. So I have vivid mental images and have had scenarios like the one you talked about when you weren't even seeing the road at one point, just the imagined thing. However I have very little control, if I try to imagine the apple it's an apple for a split second but then it's a banana and then a laptop and so on. Also sometimes this happens with getting lost in thought and I'm not trying to imagine things and forget what's happening around me. This has become a problem when trying to get work done or in some of the worst cases, during exams. Do you have any advice or could you direct me to any videos of yours that might help? This the first video of yours I'm watching so I'm very new to the channel.

I THINK I have Aphantasia, in the pass I split my head open at the back of my head so I don't know if that gave me this inability. I'd love to know if there's a way to confirm I got this or something else.

I don't know if I have aphantasia or not but I definately don't have hyperphantasia and prophantasia. I can imagine something in my mind but I have to really concentrate and it is very hard for me.

I have hyper realistic visuals, smells and touch. Music is hazy though. Very helpful when comes to filmmaking, but leads to many sleep issues as I see horrible stuff in front of me if I’m stressed. Edit: In addition, when I was a kid I would see my nightmares in front of me in a specific part of the house even when awake. This subsided with age but if I’m very stressed I still see things for a split second.

I need to know if I do because I can say the stuff in my head but its pitch black if I'm trying to think of it but when I open my eyes I see colors on the wall and when I keep blinking it moves around. Please replie if you understand what im talking about

I can vividly feell things, taste things, smell things and hear things but when I have to imagine how a physical object looks it’s like subtitles on a black screen describing things

This is fascinating to me. I get flashes of imagery, but it’s more often than not incohesive sections of detail but not the whole thing, and I can’t hold those flashes of detail in my mind at all...it’s almost like a black silhouette of the object or scene with small visual descriptors randomly appearing. Weirdly I get incredibly cohesive visuals on the cusp of sleep, but those are not conscious thoughts. Feels like there’s a slight disconnect going on 😅 i can draw “from memory” but those drawings come together on the paper, either feeling right or wrong and fixing it accordingly rather than having a clear plan of what I’m attempting to draw. Very interesting discovering the ways my own and other people’s minds function

Never heard about this before, but I have been painting for a decade, but I cannot paint anything without having what paint from directly in front of my eyes. If more than a couple of seconds passes I have to look at the original again. Could that be a mild form of aphantasia perhaps?

There's also Fantasia, which is a 1940 American animated musical anthology film produced and released by Walt Disney Productions, with a sequel titled Fantasia 2000.

For some odd reason I closed my eyes and imagined a flag and opened my eyes and a mini full color flag appeared!

I definitely don't have it. Im constantly taking pictures in my mind of everything I see. That's how I can remember where I've seen things because I have all these pictures in my mind. A scent can go along with these pictures snd that will really make me remember a moment. It's not something I have to work at it's just happens.. I always thought I was a daydreamer but man my mind doesn't stop. Husband will ask if I've seen his keys then I close my eyes and the picture of where I saw his keys comes into view then I can tell him they're on the floor by the right side of the couch then my husband calls me a witch.

I can only visualize things a little with my eyes open but, when they are closed l only see black with white windows ( The ones from my school when the sun shines into them, l always looked at them when l got bored in class ).

Great info. I tried to find out if it's normal that the pictures are so vague and not really like eyesight and nobody I asked could tell me.

Sooooo cute..😍

I have total aphantasia for sure... it feels very empty and depressing.....

yeah that hyperphantasia thing happens sometimes when i bike to school. and suddenly i just get completly in my mind. but even tho i basically dont even se the road anymore my body still just goes autopilot, so i still dodge people and stop at lights. its weird

For 2 years I'm aware of Aphantasia, seeing things with my eyes closed or dreaming was never visual, taste and smell also don't work. Recalling senses like feeling balance, falling, flying and skating do work and hearing my own voice or music alway's been working in my thoughts and dreams, both are build up in words for the biggest part. Recently I made progress in the visual part of thinking and now I can change from black to other dark colors, sometimes with dops ligher colors when I do practice the WHM meditation and cold water exposure.

Ok, this video is certainly useful. It makes me be unsure about having aphantasia or not - before the video I thought I certainly have aphantasia. I think I have to search for indirect evidence for aphantasia. For example, the inability to solve a magic cube, even if I have a book describing how to do it. Or a horrible spatial orientation. Or the ability (or lack of) to have a sexual phantasy (are studies done on this?). I have also problems solving additions. For example, I can solve 238 plus 33 (271) by doing this: 238 + 30 + 3 if I see the numbers like when I am writing this. But I can’t visualize the whole thing, or perhaps I can, but it takes a lot of time, as I tend to forget the numbers, like for example if somebody tells me “how much is 238 plus 33?” I begin to calculate 238 plus 30 but I tend to forget the 3 which I left out in the first addition. Is this something typical for people with aphantasia? Something else. I play chess, and I have an incredible difficulty calculating lines. People have to keep the image of a position after calculating a line, so they have to go back to this position to calculate another variation from this position (without this you spend too much time calculating everything from the initial position over and over again). For me it is simply impossible to keep this position in my mind, even in easy positions and even after only two moves. There is for me no way to visualize where my pieces are, so I always have to go back to the initial position, which is ridiculous.

Prophantasic myself, but with smell, taste, and hearing, but not so much with visual or touch. Imagining smells and tastes for me is a literal tangible thing. It's an amazing thing in the kitchen, as I tend to use it to mix flavors mentally and know how they're going to taste ahead of time. Same with music. I can imagine a song and literally hear it or compse a new song completely.

I see nothing in my mind's eye. I am fine with it. I am 61 years old, and I would freak out if I started seeing images. I guess the one advantage I have is that I do not relive a bad image. We need all types of people and I am glad the world is filled with many types.

Do you think this relates to ADHD? I always wondered if it is because I don’t have a sense of stillness in my mind.

This got me curious if I do have aphantasia. I have always thought that imagination doesn’t need to actually see something.

Is there a spectrum of imagination like this for audio imagination? I feel like i have a strong audio imagination as i’m always listening to music in my head, and when im thinking/daydreaming i mostly tell the story by talking and understanding what that means in my head, but that could just be completely normal.

I have aphantasia in each senses, but I'm an artist, I'm drawing stuff quite well, and also I have lucid dreams, and I learned it pretty easley, it's a little confusing if you ask me.

Anyone ever tried stimulating the body with your mind? I can kind of simulate pressure in certain places of my body like the bridge of my nose and just tried with my shin bone and that also worked. Like imagine pushing against the side of the bridge of your nose with your finger, I can create that sensation as if there was a real finger pushing against it (EDIT: to be more precise, I don't feel any sensation of something actually touching my skin it's as if something has phased through my skin and the pressure is originating within more like a muscle or perhaps the concept of chi).. kinda makes you think what is really "real", I would advise any looking to train the imagination to be ready to train your whole being too as training the mind's eye can bring up or uncover issues that normally are not so apparent