1 is being able to visualise in lots of detail, 5 is not being able to do it at all. My minds eye can create images that can take priority over what I am actually seeing. They aren’t hallucinations because I’m not actually seeing them.
I did the test, except with a jalepeno instead of an apple. I could imagine it still on the plant, I could see the corking that jalepenos sometimes get, I could rotate it and see it from all angles, and I could imagine cutting it up, seeing inside it then putting the slices on a pizza.
Then I looked at the test again and I see I was supposed to close my eyes. There’s nothing around that would put jalepenos in my mind, so it must have come from my imagination.
Now imagine that happening, except with a memory of trauma.
I guess I have the opposite of this. Hyperphantasia? I’m a knitter: right now I’m planning a project with multiple colours, and have been sorting through various combinations in my head to see what might work. I’ll do up swatches later, but right now it’s all brainwork, and I can see it clear as day.
This seems as if it might be related: I can also smell things just by thinking about them, like not just remember what they smell like, but have the actual experience of the odour as if it were in front of me (as long as there isn’t anything seriously competing with it). Eighties Dior Poison (not the reformulated version on the shelves these days), a freshly cut peach fuzz and all, a summer morning with a newly mown lawn — I just have to think about it and it’s there.
Not more useful, just useful. When I talked about this with my colleagues, they were skeptical because they couldn’t imagine mentally sorting and classifying visual material without being able to actually visualize it. Turns out you can, just not the same way.
I have no trouble recognizing settings, places and scenes I’ve seen before. I just can’t conjure up the images and mentally ‘view’ them. The idea that (for example) a crime witness could recall details that they’d seen once, and later pick out new information from that memory, is an absurdity to folks like us.
This. Personal experience of a shared situation is rather jarring when you think about at the really detailed level. We can produce a monochromatic light source, we can measure its frequency, and that will arrive at a specific “color”. Yet 10 people may all see a slightly different shade of yellow. You start thinking about this stuff long enough and you end up asking yourself what is even yellow… And then for that one person with color vision issue, you realize that a bannana is just a lighter shade of what you think is red.
Yeah, that’s me as well. I have no problem rotating 3D objects in my mind (also, TIL that apparently in America that’s a test they make you do in school?) and when I picture an apple I have a specific apple and a specific scene in mind and I have no problem describing it. But that’s pure thought, it’s not visual. Well it is, but it also isn’t? I have a hard time believing that people actually see things, like, literally and are not just describing what I just described in other words.
Hyperphantasia is double edged. I can easily visualize (for example) projects in detail, but having had far too much experience with how power tools can go wrong, I often imagine myself into scary situations.
Spacial awareness/reasoning are often used on tests to determine if a child could benefit from accelerated course work or supplemental course work. I dislike the term they use here, Gifted.
The ones I remember taking looked like the one below and were paired with a lot of reading/language tests. My kid took tests about a few years ago and scored very high on the spatial, which made sense to me. They don’t ever show the parents the tests, so I’m not sure what they looked like for a kindergartner who cannot read yet. Still skeptical these tests actually determine what they say they do. At least they’ve stopped administering “IQ” tests to figure out if a kid needs supplemental stuff.
Someone who scored a one on this aphantasia test would probably do well with the spatial awareness tests. I’m in the one category. I’m also very cautious with physical risk (like my kid) because I can easily envision in great detail everything that could go wrong.
Edit to add the picture
That video was really interesting; it’s so impressive when people figure out how to test things that seem untestable.
I’m probably a 3 or 4? But I find it hard to really tell. When I hear “picture an apple” I need to know what kind of apple. A McIntosh? Granny Smith? Yellow Delicious? Red Delicious?
And while I can picture the yellow shade of the Yellow Delicious and have a pretty vivid sense memory of its smell and taste and the feel and sound of biting into it, it’s hard to picture the apple as a complete item.
Even trying to picture a square, I find I have trouble with more than a single corner at a time. But it’s not like my mind’s eye is completely blank or greyscale. I guess my visual memory can be fairly vivid but it’s hard to picture new things from scratch.
It looks a lot like the one I remember taking. Odd I remember it so clearly. I also remember thinking it was such a weird question for a test.
For mine, the dot is a hole and the question was to pick what the paper would look like after the hole was made and the paper unfolded. There was a series of questions with different folds and holes in different places.
This is interesting. As in lots of the other answers, I had no idea some/most people have really vivid mental imagery.
Judging by the scale, I’d say I score 4 with occasional flashes up to 3.
On the other hand, also like others have mentioned, I have what seems to be a fairly unusually developed ability to mentally manipulate in three dimensions—but the experience of it isn’t really visual.
Just going by people’s responses here, it sounds like aphantasia is much more common than 4%.
I’m a 1, and have no idea how I would be able to function if I couldn’t picture things in my mind. I’m a visual artist by trade, but do have some difficulty with spacial manipulation/rotating things mentally. I can get there, but it takes a lot of thought. Also, I suck at math, mental puzzles, and assembling things – eg., I would be a terrible car mechanic. I like to tell people that it took me well into my 50s to figure out that I’m terrible at figuring out things.
I think that’s a mixture of a self-selecting audience (you’re more likely to comment if you have a similar experience) and self-diagnosing not meeting clinical standards (many of those commenting might think of themselves as aphantasic while a doctor wouldn’t).
I feel like my mind’s eye needs glasses. Imagery is elusive and slippery, sometimes clear but more often indistinct. It’s very frustrating, really.
Yes, this! It’s super frustrating. Occasionally I can get pretty okay detail (edit: that stays with me), mostly for things I’ve closely observed pretty recently, but more often I can only get a brief image that kind of flickers away pretty quickly.
I’m a 1, and have no idea how I would be able to function if I couldn’t picture things in my mind. I’m a visual artist by trade
I’m an artist who’s a 4. You do it all on the canvas. You learn to draw stuff from the ground up, all that boxes/tubes/eggs in perspective stuff. How to draw centerlines on 3d shapes and arrange details around them. As you get better there’s exercises like “okay today in figure drawing class I want you to try to imagine what this pose would look like if you were on the other side of the model”, where you use everything you’ve learnt about construction and anatomy and lighting to fake it. Eventually you end up at a point where you can just sort of start drawing and noodle out a bunch of receding shapes and make it all work without any underdrawing or construction because you have done it the hard way so many times and can do most of the work in your head. But not in such a way that you’re seeing it overlapping the actual drawing and tracing over it. Just… holding it in this other mental space of nothing but ghostly forms, and thinking about that as you push the pencil around.
There is a story I read in Chuck Jones’ autobiography: one day one of the WB shorts animators was in a car accident and got a concussion. Once he recovered and got back to work, he was a lot faster. He said this was because now he could just imagine the finished drawing of Bugs Bunny right there on the paper and trace it off, instead of working out a lot of the construction in multiple steps.
I can’t see anything if close my eyes, it’s dark with occasional flashes of ghostly colour, dark greens, blues, and purples. If I wait and look in to that swirling darkness I might catch a fragment of a memory, the vague outline of a ceiling of a half remembered corridor. I was about to mention it’s like when you have a melody in your head but it’s not possible to actually sing it for some reason, but that experience also may not be typical. I find mental arithmetic very hard unless I can see the numerals, but 3d transformations are simple. I can draw objects from any requested angle but there’s no picturing going on inside my head. All that happens on the paper. If I really concentrate I can bring up a flash of a simple object, but nothing fancier than a book or something. My dreams have imagery though, clear and detailed down to mechanisms or stable text, faces are often unstable. Those who are also aphantasiastic, do you also have visual dreams?
Yeah, me too. I’m sure I don’t have aphantasia, but I don’t actually ‘see things’ when I close my eyes. I can imagine and recall visual imagery (with or without eyes closed) in some detail, but wouldn’t describe it as ‘seeing’.
