I almost certainly have aphantasia, though I wasn't aware it's estimated to be 1-4% of the population.
I'd love to see more research on this. Because it seems like this is something that can be modified. And it really feels like I'm missing out on something special about the human experience - which makes me kind of sad.
When I smoke weed, or take shrooms, my minds eye becomes way more vivid. ONLY then, can I close my eyes and actually SEE an apple or a rotating cube, or whatever I want to imagine. Reading fiction books actually becomes captivating.
It would be SO cool if there was a drug that gave me this ability but didn't make me "high" or confused in the way weed or shrooms do.
> When I smoke weed, or take shrooms, my minds eye becomes way more vivid. ONLY then, can I close my eyes and actually SEE an apple or a rotating cube, or whatever I want to imagine. Reading fiction books actually becomes captivating.
> It would be SO cool if there was a drug that gave me this ability but didn't make me "high" or confused in the way weed or shrooms do.
I experienced exactly this! It turned out that, for me, the root cause was multiple B vitamin deficiencies; correcting them caused my internal vision to become INCREDIBLY vivid. B vitamins are involved in neurotransmitter production (ex. [0]) -- particularly serotonin, which is known to interact with vision[1] -- and it's been amazing realising what I've been missing out on. Psychedelics[2] and cannabis[3] "improving" the condition makes sense since both have serotonergic activity (5HT2A specifically).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folate#Neurological_disorders "[...] the bioactive folate, methyltetrahydrofolate (5-MTHF), a direct target of methyl donors such as S-adenosyl methionine (SAMe), recycles the inactive dihydrobiopterin (BH2) into tetrahydrobiopterin (BH4), the necessary cofactor in various steps of monoamine synthesis, including that of dopamine and serotonin."
I have definitely gotten it back from intense meditation. I went to an intense meditation retreat which had us meditating all day (a vipassana 10 day course). For unrelated reasons I left after a few days, but my aphantasia was replaced with something very different after like a day and a half and I couldn't stop seeing things everywhere
Still a bit weird, health-wise, but a lot more in your control than drugs.
I’ve experienced this too (only twice!) with strong weed (sativa) and it really took me by surprise. It was nothing like hallucinating - seeing objects in front of me morph / appear - but rather when I closed my eyes I could _imagine_ things.
I could picture myself on a beach or walking through a forest, something I’ve always felt frustrated I could never create in my mind. I’ll admit it was a slightly scary experience…
By contrast I have a friend with a wonderfully vivid imagination. He’s a photographer by trade and spontaneously captures moments / scenes on his phone while we’re walking along. We’re always asking questions about the other’s brain :)
It’s different when you sober. Weed not only helps with imagining, it makes a mind hyperfocused and forgetful, so to say. As this can bring you far away from where you are, the visions are also more stable-ish because you don’t remember what was there a minute ago (unless you’re trying to) and live in a moment.
As a possibly interesting data point I also have no visual imagination, and I did a lot of mind-altering substances in a past era of my life. However the only interior mental imagery I ever saw was seemingly random and intense fractal patterns. Never could relate it to any conscious thought like imagining an apple. I also ~never experienced much in the way of eyes-open visual hallucinations, even on rather high doses of LSD. One exception to this was DMT but it was still just a “fractal tunnel”, similar to what I could see with my eyes closed on other chemicals.
It wasn’t until much later (after I stopped tripping) that I learned about aphantasia as a name for my daily experience and I’ve always assumed that it was why my experience on hallucinogens varied so much from more common descriptions. It’s interesting to hear that they might “unlock” the experience of imagination for others.
Have you considered explicitly using weed or shrooms as an on-ramp to exercising this ability? You could devote some time and slowly build up your ability.
Just as you can learn to wiggle your toes independently, or play the piano, or learn a new language, which require wiring new pathways, it's possible to learn to wire new pathways to non-motor areas of your brain. But it likely requires the same amount of effort.
I believe that developing the ability to mentally visualize more vividly is the explicit goal of some certain kinds of meditation. If you're interested you might look into "fire kasina".
I remain fairly convinced that the ability to visualise things in your imagination is a skill like any other and people don’t so much have aphantasia as an inherent condition that they probably started with little innate capacity and lost most of it through disuse.
If that’s the case, you can probably improve it simply by repeatedly using what you have. I say that because my ability to think visually improved greatly when I started drawing. Also I’m still not very good at conjuring well proportioned and shaded objects from nothing but I can pull them out of my memories.
I think most people literally can't imagine the range of difference here. As far as I can tell, "what I have" is zero for visual imagination, and I have no recollection of that ever being different. You might as well be telling me that I need to lift weights with my third arm.
I’m fairly sure you can try drawing something, eventually directly from what you see to the paper (that’s how you learn to draw). I’m actually curious to know what would happen if you stuck at it.
My hypothesis is that you would get some ability to visualise at some point. That’s an experience which would be cool to carry actually.
They imagine a simulation of themselves, but this simulation isn't necessarily realistic. They run the simulation, and the words the simulation uses to describe itself "visualzing" they just repeat verbatim. Human consciousness and self-awareness are so dim that they mistake this for themselves being able to do the same.
If someone didn't have this "skill", they could prompt an LLM to "visualize", then repeat the words off the screen, and but for the clues that they're cheating bystanders wouldn't be able to tell much difference. I assert that there is no additional insight gained by the "visualization" that isn't available from the verbalization because these are, in fact, essentially the same thing.
> It would be SO cool if there was a drug that gave me this ability but didn't make me "high" or confused in the way weed or shrooms do.
On one hand, with enough practice and skill in doing drugs the "confusion" and maybe even "high" will go away, and become just more ordinary sensations
On the other hand, the drugs are certainly helpful for developing faith that it is possible to "get there", but they're not so great at "how to get there from here" (unless you're already well practiced at looking). Kind of like sleeping in the taxi to the top of a mountain versus walking up it.
Under the "travel" metaphor, I guess training in doing drugs would be training "how to get back here from there", while training Concentration alone would be training "how to get there from here". The latter is certainly more effort up front. Some people find the former to be more effort later on, unfortunately. The latter is also attractive for other reasons which should be obvious (it's free)
I experienced this recently for the first time (in 44 years) while in the hospital. Probably caused by the strong antibiotics I was on or the high fever I had a few hours earlier.
It was interesting! Didn't sleep all night, how do you phantasts do that? :-)
+1, shrooms doesn't do it for me, but if I do a high dose of THC (20-30mg) and then listen to music, I can close my eyes and get some kind of visualization. It's still fleeting, but I can feel my mind react to it as super novel stimulus (otherwise 100% visual aphant).
I did get pretty strong visual experiences from Ketamine therapy, but it's completely different from mental images. I felt transported to a different "head space" where there was abstract visual imagery that felt "real" but completely disembodied and not related to day-to-day experience.
I really can't comprehend what it's like to have normal visual imagery or be a hyper-visualizer.
I wonder if meditation could give you this ability? After having an intense 'breakthrough' during meditation I had an enhanced ability to imagine things, especially visually, for ~1 week. I stopped meditating for a while because it was too intense and immersive.
It felt like I 'let go' of some subtle assumptions around how I would visualize things normally and had an expanded ability, but it also seemed more intrusive and without the same 'distance' between 'me' and the imagining.
Use it as a strength you are not bound by preconceived imagery of what should be. Use the way you recall and collect information to be creative, solve problems and bring a different perspective to things.
I'd love to see more research on this. Because it seems like this is something that can be modified. And it really feels like I'm missing out on something special about the human experience - which makes me kind of sad.
When I smoke weed, or take shrooms, my minds eye becomes way more vivid. ONLY then, can I close my eyes and actually SEE an apple or a rotating cube, or whatever I want to imagine. Reading fiction books actually becomes captivating.
It would be SO cool if there was a drug that gave me this ability but didn't make me "high" or confused in the way weed or shrooms do.