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Most people can “see” vivid imagery in their minds. They can imagine a chirping bird from hearing the sounds of one, for example. But people with aphantasia can’t do this. A new study explores how their brains work.
Growing up, Roberto S. Luciani had hints that his brain worked differently than most people. He didn’t relate when people complained about a movie character looking different than what they’d pictured from the book, for instance.
[...] That’s because Luciani has a condition called aphantasia — an inability to picture objects, people and scenes in his mind. When he was growing up, the term didn’t even exist. But now, Luciani, a cognitive scientist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, and other scientists are getting a clearer picture of how some brains work, including those with a blind mind’s eye.
In a recent study, Luciani and colleagues explored the connections between the senses, in this case, hearing and seeing. In most of our brains, these two senses collaborate. Auditory information influences activity in brain areas that handle vision. But in people with aphantasia, this connection isn’t as strong, researchers report November 4 in Current Biology.
[...] The results highlight the range of brain organizations, says cognitive neuroscientist Lars Muckli, also of the University of Glasgow. “Imagine the brain has an interconnectedness that comes in different strengths,” he says. At one end of the spectrum are people with synesthesia, for whom sounds and sights are tightly mingled (SN: 11/22/11). “In the midrange, you experience the mind’s eye — knowing something is not real, but sounds can trigger some images in your mind. And then you have aphantasia,” Muckli says. “Sounds don’t trigger any visual experience, not even a faint one.”
The results help explain how brains of people with and without aphantasia differ, and they also give clues about brains more generally, Muckli says. “The senses of the brain are more interconnected than our textbooks tell us.”
The results also raise philosophical questions about all the different ways people make sense of the world (SN: 6/28/24). Aphantasia “exists in a realm of invisible differences between people that make our lived experiences unique, without us realizing,” Luciani says. “I find it fascinating that there may be other differences lurking in the shadow of us assuming other people experience the world like us.”
Reference: B. M. Montabes de la Cruz et al. Decoding sound content in the early visual cortex of aphantasic participants. Current Biology. Vol. 34, p. 5083. November 4, 2024. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.09.008.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 23, @01:13AM (21 children)
Probably because it's unnecessary for the individual. A visual imagination doesn't provide much utility outside weird memory palace tricks, but having a population with a wide spectrum of imagination types provides greater diversity of thought and probably increases the overall survivability of the group.
(Score: 3, Informative) by mhajicek on Saturday November 23, @02:27AM (1 child)
My minds eye supports 3d solid models. This helps me be more proficient in mechanical design and certain other skills.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2, Interesting) by aafcac on Saturday November 23, @06:46PM
It also limits you to the number of dimensions you can deal with when solving problems if you have to visualize things. I can personally use as many dimensions as I need when thinking, because I'm not limited to what I can visualize. That being said, I am still rather good mechanically, I just can't see any of what I'm trying to imagine.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mhajicek on Saturday November 23, @02:29AM (3 children)
As a trade-off, I cannot hear more than one person speaking at a time.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 4, Insightful) by driverless on Saturday November 23, @05:47AM (2 children)
Given things like aphantasia, I wonder how many other things there are that either you're missing out on without being aware of it, or that you have that others don't without you being aware of it.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by aafcac on Saturday November 23, @06:48PM (1 child)
Considering how recent the word aphantasia is, I'm guessing probably a lot. Things like color blindness are relatively common, but often times still require a screening to point it out as it's mainly if you're hanging around doing things that require normal colorvision for it to become clear that other people are seeing something different. I've got limited IR vision in exchange for issues identifying greens. It was only in the last few years when I had access to a walk in freezer where the lights could be turned off that I was able to finally experience complete darkness.
(Score: 1) by skaplon on Tuesday November 26, @01:37PM
Missing a sensor it's easy to picture. But I got to know about people that have more color sensors than most, people that can see some infra-red or detect ultra-violet, all that just about vision. I'm pretty sure an really extensive search could find more than Our regular kind of sensors too
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 23, @03:39AM (6 children)
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by driverless on Saturday November 23, @05:42AM (4 children)
No that's women :-).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Saturday November 23, @04:38PM (3 children)
The main impediment to getting rid of the last of brick and mortar retail is my wife saying things like "I need to see it in person before buying it"
Like most engineer-types I could buy a living room couch using a parametric search at Digikey, if Digikey sold couches, and it would fit perfectly and look exactly like I wanted when it arrived and I would be very happy, but my wife can't buy a couch without IRL shopping.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aafcac on Saturday November 23, @10:56PM
In all fairness, the dimensions aren't everything. Some pieces of furniture are just not comfortable and you wouldn't necessarily know that if you didn't sit on them.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday November 24, @08:03AM (1 child)
Hmm, I'd at least want Dave from EEVBlog to post a teardown before I bought it.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday November 24, @04:46PM
DiodeGoneWild is funnier
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 23, @05:58AM
I don't have a "mind's eye". But I can look at a parking space and estimate whether my car will fit.
I have excellent spatial reasoning, though. Among the best of anyone I personally know. I think the neurons you hallucinating types are using to make imaginary pictures are, in my brain, used to build a spatial model of the world around me.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday November 23, @09:26AM (5 children)
Unless you want to work as a CAD designer, or a machinist, or anything that involves visualizing parts before modeling them or machining them.
I worked with SolidWorks for years. One of my colleagues - an accountant - could NOT visualize anything in space. He told me seeing the parts I was modeling on screen was always a ah-ha! moment when he saw them, but as soon as he turned away from the screen, he couldn't figure out which side of the part a threaded hole or a fillet he saw 5 seconds earlier was.
It's completely obvious to those of us blessed with the ability to visualize things in space in their head. But that guy was blind as a bat in his mental theater. It was even bewildering talking to him about mechanics and clearly getting the feeling that I was talking to an alien who had no concept of the obvious stuff I was describing.
The main takeaway here is: don't dismiss others' difficulties just because you don't have them.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Saturday November 23, @04:29PM (1 child)
It can be EXPENSIVE. I distinctly remember a long time ago working on a waveguide routing problem where I could look and think and then knew it can't be done in 3d space but I was not permitted to not design it until I spent an hour or two in a CAD program mocking up a demo proving an intersection between two waveguides no matter the routing. I was so mad I had to waste all that time "when its obvious". That was back when I was a W-2 employee as a 1099 now I'd be like "sure I can spend all week on that if you want me to".
Its a perfect analogy to the four color theorem for map coloring. Some people intuitively "know" its correct but imagine having a shitty boss that demands a formal written proof of it before believing you. IIRC the four color problem wasn't proven until post Y2K and it took computer software to prove it so that's an enormous PITA and waste of effort.
I'm talking about stuff slightly more practical and less abstract than this, but not much:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_object [wikipedia.org]
I can only imagine the agony of someone employed at a fab shop where the boss gets a drawing and demands the crew build one of these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_trident [wikipedia.org]
One nice part about CAD/CAM and 3-d printing is the slicer software will refuse to render rebuildable stuff. At least stuff that can't be built in our universe. Just because you can draw it in 2d doesn't mean you can make it in 3d.
Anyway the above is how it feels when someone who can visualize stuff gets into an argument at work with someone who can't visualize stuff but is pretty stubborn about it. I imagine working at an integrated circuit fab must be a giant headache not because of the job, but because of the coworkers who can't do it, for example.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aafcac on Monday November 25, @06:30AM
The intuitive answer isn't always the right answer and it can be hard to justify something being impossible if you don't try. A good example is that if a bat and ball cost $1.10 together and the bat costs $1 more than the ball, how much are each? The first answer people come up with is usually wrong if they don't do the work.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 23, @07:04PM (2 children)
OP here. I didn't state it, but I don't have a visual imagination. I've never had any issue doing drafting or CAD when I took classes on the subject in HS and college, or used the 3D printers and CNC routers that I have at home, or any kind of spatial reasoning. If everyone with a visual imagination could use it to replace CAD, why would we have CAD programs in the first place?!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ChrisMaple on Sunday November 24, @04:01AM (1 child)
CAD allows greater complexity and finer resolution than visual imagination.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 28, @01:23AM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Saturday November 23, @04:17PM
This whole thread seems to be one line confusion about "minds eye imagination" vs visuospatial function.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visuospatial_function [wikipedia.org]
I have good skills at both and I can't figure out if they are two separate things or not. If you want a sarcastic way to look at it, visuospatial is the ability to be productive so its part of IQ tests and "minds eye" is what bored people do when daydreaming so it makes no money and that's the only difference? Or maybe not?
I would further extend the concept that there exists visualization and there exists analysis. Visualization is like imagine what a completed dovetailed bookcase shelf would look like before assembly THEN draw it in CAD to see it all connect together, whereas analysis is knowing 3-d space without seeing a "CAD drawing in your head" it is quite trivial for me to figure out the proper order and method of woodworking or metalworking operations to create a part and none of it involves a Hollywood animation. An interesting anecdote: I can park a trailer in reverse and I do it strictly via analysis and I wonder if people who can't back up a trailer are trying to imagine little 3-d models in their mind. Another example of analysis vs visualization is I can look at a car's engine bay and I "know" that I'll need to rotate an alternator 90 degrees in this axis and 45 degrees in that axis to pull it out of the car; this is not something I've done more than a couple times in my life but I find it easy; I think there are people who just "pull real hard" and generally beat the heck out of the radiator trying to pull an alternator. I can visualize stuff like PCB routing in my mind quite easily (you can't autoroute microwave stripline, not with the cheap shitty amateur grade tools I have access to; also, trace length is sometimes a part of the circuit LOL). I feel the analysis skill and the "imagine seeing a 3d cad image in my head" skill are two totally different skills merely a coincidence I'm good at both and some people will be good at one or the other or even neither.
I could suggest even further splitting into 3d and 4d. I can do 4d adding time. I don't see how you can drive a trailer in reverse without 4d skills, although using only 3d you could probably do workshop fabrication, mostly. I KNOW there are people who can do 3d but can't do 4d I have met them and had to do the thinking for them.
Possibly this splits the skill into 8 categories, the combos of minds eye imagination vs visuospatial function and then split each of those into analysis and visualization and then split each of those into 3d and 4d skills.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Saturday November 23, @06:51PM
Oddly enough, memory palaces do not require the ability to see the palace in order to use the technique. It's mainly about the effort you take in really seeing/knowing the thing. I can't see the things that I put into my memory palace, but it still works for me. I think a lot of that has to do with the mistaken assumption that you're just visualizing. If you're properly using the technique, you're supposed to use many different senses, as many of them as you can. Touch, smell, motion, sight, sound and an others that you can figure out how to bring into it.
(Score: 0, Troll) by YeaWhatevs on Saturday November 23, @06:19AM (3 children)
Like aphantasia or synesthesia. Those are just people who are extremely fixated on their own specialness, and have chosen to use the ultimate unprovable, their own perception.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 23, @07:24AM
While synesthesia is rare enough to be a "fairy", aphantasia is pretty common. It's nothing special or particularly different, more like being left handed than being a special and noteworthy existence.
(Score: 4, Informative) by stormreaver on Saturday November 23, @07:30AM
As a person with no mind's eye, let be assure you that you are very, very wrong.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 23, @04:30PM
What is with the moronic posts? Clearly your thoughts are immature and ironically it is your "specialness" that is to blame.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday November 23, @09:15AM
You think that's bad? I have adumbo.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Snospar on Saturday November 23, @02:12PM (2 children)
Until around 5 years ago (I can't remember precisely when I noticed), I could easily picture things in my mind... think of a London bus and hey presto I've got an image in my head of the iconic red omnibus, or think of a Rubik's cube and there it is. I chose those as examples because they are simple, iconic and should be easy to "imagine". Now when I try and think of those things I no longer get an image in my head at all. I can still describe them; I could (crudely) draw them; and I could instantly, and easily, identify them from a picture; but I can't summon up an image in my mind.
If I try hard to create an image in my mind I get an odd feeling as though I'm aware that something is just there beyond my grasp. It's hard to describe what it feels like, the closest comparison I can come up with is when you trip over a word in a sentence and it just isn't there i.e. "it was on the tip of my tongue" - it's that same feeling that something is just eluding you.
I was worried that it might have an impact on my life, diminish my creativity or cause other "memory" issues but so far I don't seem to have noticed any changes (maybe I wouldn't). I did mention it to my doctor in passing but they didn't appear to have any notion of what I was talking about and didn't seem interested if it wasn't causing me any problems. Weirdly I still dream, I've never been a good sleeper so vivid dreams are rare but they do still happen from time to time and are fully detailed visual and audio events - I would have thought that was the same part of the brain but maybe the subconscious is just able to access something that my conscious brain no longer can.
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(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 23, @04:50PM (1 child)
I noticed it when reading over ten years ago. Stopped reading fiction because of it. I quit drinking recently and now my mind's eye has never been better. Anecdotal, sure but I do love reading again. And I don't miss the booze.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Snospar on Sunday November 24, @12:18AM
Interesting, I do like a drink. Pretty hammered right now and pretty happy too.
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(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Saturday November 23, @06:11PM (1 child)
I don't know if it is related, but I remember reading about people who claimed that their hearing was better when they wore their prescription spectacles. Nothing is coming up for me on a quick Internet search, but I wonder if that might be influence by the existence or strength of the interconnection between the parts of the brain responsible for processing auditory and visual input.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aafcac on Saturday November 23, @06:54PM
I wouldn't be surprised, It's normal for the brain to focus on one thing or another, if fewer resources are going to processing what you're seeing, it probably frees up some for hearing. Personally, I found that when I used to play music, that I'd go practically completely bind apart from the little bit of vision I was using to read the music when playing. I'd more or less take the notes on the page as being a sort of a hint about what I was supposed to be doing, but the actual cue would come from what was being played.
(Score: 2) by srobert on Monday November 25, @04:18PM
I'm wondering whether those with some degree of aphantasia are more capable of visualizing things about which they read than things about which they hear, or vice versa. How does that affect the enjoyment people get from reading, or from hearing, a story?