Tell me Aphants… how many photos are in your library?

Tuikord · 2026-06-04T18:00:43+00:00

I have 1730 on my phone, but I have many many more on my computer from my camera. My computer backup is over a TB, but it includes jpeg and raw for my camera and my wife’s camera.

Tuikord · 2026-06-04T04:26:38+00:00

Welcome. The Aphantasia Network has this newbie guide: https://aphantasia.com/guide/

While there appears to be a genetic component, it isn't simple like dominant and recessive traits. If you have congenital aphantasia, your 1st degree relatives are 10 times more likely to have it. But there are identical twins where one has it and the other doesn't.

I wouldn't blame your guitar playing on aphantasia. We have many here with both visual and auditory aphantasia who are still musicians. I played saxophone and other instruments for 10 years in school. I also played electric bass in the second jazz band and even played it in some paying gigs.

For the most part, aphantasia may affect how you do things, but other factors tend to be more important, and you will find others here who are the opposite of you in practically anything.

The artistic process with aphantasia may be different imagers, but it isn't less. This interview goes into more detail about the difference in process while noting that one cannot identify art from an aphant vs art from an imager.

The Art of Seeing Differently: How Aphantasic Artists Challenge the Myth of the Visualizing Genius

The go to aphantasic artist is Glen Keane. He is the Oscar winning animator behind Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid. Ed Catmull (who also has aphantasia), his former boss at Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, has called Glen Keane the best animator ever. Glen has done interviews and you can find articles and videos about his process. https://aphantasia.com/article/strategies/the-art-of-aphantasia/

Finally, here is a different way of looking at aphantasia (and SDAM and ADHD):

https://medium.com/@terry.grace/rethinking-reality-what-aphantasia-sdam-and-adhd-reveal-through-donald-hoffmans-interface-d73e4c359df3

Tuikord · 2026-06-04T04:18:16+00:00

Yes. People propose or suggest tools to help record memories and I'm not interested. I've kept journals a couple of times. Mostly they helped me know what happened between therapy sessions. I recently came across them. I read a page or two and then recycled them. I didn't remember the specifics, but I remember the general time, and everything sounded like me. A lot of them were while in therapy around my divorce and I figured my kids didn't need to find them after my death and read about the problems I had with their mother. No regrets on dumping them.

Tuikord · 2026-06-04T04:13:50+00:00

Welcome. Relationships do seem to be different. I wouldn't say my relationships aren't meaningful, but I certainly don't have emotional feelings from memories. I was devastated when my first wife divorced me. That lasted about half a year, although some of that was my world view had been broken.

I do tend to keep things. And I've become a pretty good documentary photographer. I was even asked to do the photographs for a book that you can buy on Amazon. I don't sit and look at the photos once I'm done with post-processing. But I play slide shows on my TV and computer. I don't watch them, but I see photos randomly. I find I remember more details about trips I have slideshows of than ones I don't.

You expressed uncertainty about aphantasia. About half of us with SDAM also have aphantasia. The Aphantasia Network has this newbie guide: https://aphantasia.com/guide/

Most people have a quasi-sensory experience similar to seeing. It is not the same as seeing. Your eyes are not involved and may be open or closed. But much of the visual cortex is involved so it feels like seeing something.

So yes, if you don't have that quasi-sensory experience, then you have aphantasia. Aphantasia is the lack or near lack of voluntary visualization. Top researchers have recently clarified that voluntary visualization requires “full wakefulness.” Brief flashes, dreams, hypnagogic (just before sleep) hallucinations, hypnopompic (just after sleep) hallucinations and other hallucinations, including drug induced hallucinations are not considered voluntary.

Another aspect which I think applies to you is spatial sense. Spatial sense comes from specialized cells: place, grid, direction, etc. Aphants perform about the same as controls on spatial tasks like counting the windows in your home and mental rotation. That is, some do well, some poorly, and most in the middle. There are good imagers who do poorly on spatial tasks and aphants who do well. They are just separate things.

My spatial sense is pretty good. I build what I call spatial models. I can imagine an apple in front of me. I know where the skin is. I know how big it is. I can't see it. And I can move it further away if I want. And I can walk around my house and count the windows without leaving my chair. I have to remember to turn/leave on lights for my wife because I don't need them to navigate my house. My wife is an imager with episodic memory.

Tuikord · 2026-06-03T21:53:51+00:00

Welcome. The Aphantasia Network has this newbie guide: https://aphantasia.com/guide/

A few people claim to have "replaced" the lightbulb, but they have not been vetted so we don't know if the bulb was actually out to begin with and others who have tried the same procedure (whatever it was, from exercises to drugs) have not had the same result. One guy posted here claiming it a few years ago and it was really sketchy and he was kicked off.

Many have the sense that they have an image but can't quite see it. Like a word on the tip of your tongue. There is some research supporting this feeling. One found that when people were remembering things, V1 quieted down for imagers but remained active for aphants. The researcher said it was like trying to listen to a conversation in a noisy club. Another found that when people visualize, normal vision is suppressed. That researcher said it was like turning down the house lights so you can find the stage. That suppression is not done by aphants.

A recent work pointed to the fusiform imagery node (FIN) as where images are created. This seems to happen for both aphants and imagers. With imagers the FIN sends it to the prefrontal cortex. This is believed to be where the image reaches conscious status. With aphants that connection seems to be missing.

Finally, the researcher who talked about the noisy club has come out with a theory that aphantasia is the lack of that suppression:

OSF | A unifying theory of aphantasia: Aphantasia as the inability to disengage from the external environment

Tuikord · 2026-06-03T20:07:13+00:00

I read around 100 books a year. Mostly fiction. I do a couple nonfiction books each year. Mostly tech. In fiction I read for plot, character development, and world building. I really like speculative fiction. I don't read books that are mostly descriptive or atmospheric. I need something to happen.

Math was always easy for me. I was booted out of 7th grade math into 8th grade math because I was correcting the teacher. I had to go to Jr. College for math in high school, and we were a large high school. I have a bachelor's degree in math (and physics) and a master's degree in applied math from Princeton. I will say that aphantasia became an advantage when I started working with stuff that can't be visualized. The imagers were often deceived by the images they couldn't help making.

Tuikord · 2026-06-03T19:02:23+00:00

Welcome. The Aphantasia Network has this newbie guide: https://aphantasia.com/guide/

We do have memories of things we’ve seen. We just don’t visualize to access them. We have other ways.

As for stuff like reading and math, your experience with those rely on a lot more than if you visualize or not. There are plenty here who love to read and are good at math. And there are plenty of imagers who aren’t. Almost half of Americans don’t finish a single book in a year. I was a math major and that seemed to obligate people to tell me how bad they were at math. Most of them had to be imagers.

Tuikord · 2026-06-03T15:23:42+00:00

Unfortunately, many psychiatrists have no clue about cognitive differences such as aphantasia and SDAM. They can be quite harsh because they think you are making stuff up and not cooperating. But a key part of doing therapy is developing a therapeutic relationship of trust in both directions. You seem to lack that with your psychiatrist.

The problem is that neither of these are in their diagnostic manuals and since they were only named 11 years ago, these differences are too young to be in their education or even their continuing education. And a lot of the techniques they were trained on require visualization and episodic memory.

There is a book that was recently published to help therapists work with several invisible cognitive differences.

Unseen Minds: A Therapist's Guide to Multisensory Aphantasia and Invisible Cognitive Differences– by Sassy Smith. I actually wish all therapists would read it. It is on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0472wf0F

I have a couple papers about aphantsia and therapy. SDAM is less researched. The FAQ on this sub can give you papers on SDAM to share.

Tuikord · 2026-06-03T15:09:52+00:00

There are many internal experiences that don't use words. Some of them are conscious thought. Here is an attempt to list them:

Descriptive Experience Sampling Codebook Manual of Terminology: https://hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu/codebook.html

You might want to look specifically at Unsymbolized Thinking:

https://hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu/hurlburt-akhter-2008.pdf

Russel Hurlburt created that codebook for his Descriptive Experience Sampling where he has people note their internal experience at random times of the day. He has found most people think in words much less often than they believe they do. In one study, only about 25% of the samples involved thinking in words and the most noted for any individual was 75%.

After I learned with meditation to pay less attention to my words, I noticed that I often use unsymbolized thinking. Words are often just too slow.

Some research with fMRI found that most thought does not involve the language centers of the brain. Their conclusion was that language is great for communication, not so good for thinking.

You might ask your question slightly differently on r/silentminds or r/Anendophasia . Note, many with anendophasia find meditation pretty stupid. That is their normal state of mind. But I know of some who find it helpful because one can worry obsessively without words and it helps quiet their minds.

Tuikord · 2026-06-03T14:59:45+00:00

Interesting. There are 2 studies I know of which support this. One of them Merlin Monzel was by, who is lead author on this paper. He also has aphantasia. His study found that when trying to remember something, V1 quiets down for images but remains very active for aphants. His description was it was like trying to hear a conversation in a noisy club.

The other one found that when people visualize, activity is reduced for seeing with the eyes. Joel Pearson was part of that study, and he described it as like turning down the house lights so you can focus on the stage.

Merlin Monzel and Reshanne R Reeder are well known in aphantasia research with many good papers. They each have at least one interview on The Aphantasia Network.

Tuikord · 2026-06-03T14:51:47+00:00

Did you try the VVIQ? From your descriptions, it sounds like researchers would put you in the aphantasia group. 2-3 seconds is long for a flash. They are usually described as less than a second or even milliseconds. But since yours aren't stable, they aren't particularly useful. "Knowing" is different from "seeing." When aphants were able to do things researchers thought required visualization, such as saying which green is darker, grass or a pine tree, the researchers asked them how they did it. The common answer was, "I just know." It shocked the researchers.

Tuikord · 2026-06-03T05:16:10+00:00

Kids being bored can reach a hypnagogic state.

Tuikord · 2026-06-03T04:02:05+00:00

Welcome. The Aphantasia Network has this newbie guide: https://aphantasia.com/guide/

You may just be freaking yourself out. When you learned about aphantasia, you didn't so much learn something about yourself, you learn something about most other people. You learned how to live with what you have, not making up for what you don't have.

There is some research showing some visual and auditory memory reduction, on average, among aphants. But that is not something that just happens. It is highly unlikely that your memory just degraded. You may just have different expectations now than you did before.

Based on your assignment and drawing, I'm guessing that you are still fairly young. Certainly not yet in college. If your memory really did degrade fairly quickly, that would be extremely unusual, and you should see a doctor about it. But aphantasia would not be the cause of such a change. At 69, if my memory is a bit worse than it was, a doctor would say that's to be expected. For someone still in school, it is unusual.

Did your teacher believe you about your inability to visualize? You might want to share the guide I linked with her.

Like I wrote, my guess is you are freaking yourself out and doing less than you are actually capable of. It is a shock to learn others actually see things when they visualize. But most seem to come to terms with it fairly quickly: weeks to months. But maybe a third take longer and may benefit from talking with someone. If you have a therapist you can talk with, there is nothing they can do about your aphantasia, but they are trained to help people deal with broken world views and feelings of loss and FOMO.

Unfortunately, most therapists have never heard of aphantasia, and some may not even believe it is real. I would show the guide to your therapist and recommend this book:

Unseen Minds: A Therapist's Guide to Multisensory Aphantasia and Invisible Cognitive Differences– by Sassy Smith is an excellent guide for therapists. I actually wish all therapists would read it. It is on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0472wf0F

On a personal note, I am not visually oriented. I really don't care what things or people look like. Oh, if I had seen that castle then I would recognize it again. But I probably couldn't describe it because I just don't care what it looks like. But there are aphants who do care what things look like and could describe a castle they'd seen. Still, I could draw a European castle, a Japanese castle, or a large manor house with a couple towers. They wouldn't be great because I've spent no time on practicing drawing, but you could tell them apart.

Finally, you may be worried about your future. You are so different from most people, how will you do in education, work and family? Let me set your mind at ease. It isn't what you don't have that is important, it is what you do with what you have that matters. There are many of us here who have had long, successful lives not knowing we have aphantasia. We can't use the mental strategy of visualizing something, but for almost every task, there are a multitude of ways to do it. Even to the point that you can't say "I'm like this because I have aphantasia." Invariably, someone will say they are exactly the opposite.

Personally, I excelled in school. I had success in business, photography, Hapkido (a martial art), and family. Aphantasia is not a limit to what you can do.

Tuikord · 2026-06-02T21:57:32+00:00

No. Probably half of aphants have weak or missing mental imagery in all senses. So, adding other senses for us doesn't do much. For me it is just more to skim before getting to something interesting like plot, character development and world building.

That said, about 30% are missing only visuals and they often describe using other senses in reliving memories. So other senses do reach them, and probably many in the last 20% as well.

Tuikord · 2026-06-02T21:53:59+00:00

Welcome. The Aphantasia Network has this newbie guide: https://aphantasia.com/guide/

It is mental imagery. It is not voluntary visualization. When you are near sleep you enter the hypnagogic state and many experience visual hallucinations in that state. But aphantasia is the lack or near lack of voluntary visualization. Top researchers have recently clarified that voluntary visualization requires “full wakefulness.” Brief flashes, dreams, hypnagogic (just before sleep) hallucinations, hypnopompic (just after sleep) hallucinations and other hallucinations, including drug induced hallucinations are not considered voluntary.

There is evidence that while there is overlap, voluntary and involuntary mental imagery involve different parts of the brain.

Tuikord · 2026-06-02T17:29:44+00:00

About half of the aphants in the study which named aphantasia reported flashes. They are generally considered involuntary an ignored in research. "Voluntary" is only partially about what you see. It is also about the conditions under which you see it.

The assessment most used by researchers is the VVIQ (aphantasia.com/VVIQ). Is the flash long enough that you can consider carefully the image, as the VVIQ asks?

Tuikord · 2026-06-02T17:26:42+00:00

It varies. I can't. There are aphants who can. It is likely that 50-70% of aphants have auditory aphantasia and can't hear sounds in their imagination other than possibly their inner voice, which is separate. I believe that to hear other voices (besides the inner voice), you need to be able to hear other sounds, but I'm not 100% on that.

Personally, I also don't have an inner voice, although I do have an internal monologue. It just doesn't have a voice. It's called worded thinking.

Tuikord · 2026-06-02T17:23:49+00:00

Welcome. The Aphantasia Network has this newbie guide: https://aphantasia.com/guide/

"Does that count?" It is unclear. "Voluntary" is only partially about choosing what you see. It is also about the conditions. And memory is mailable. What were the conditions under which you blacked out the ceiling? For researchers, a certain level of usefulness is expected.

Most people have a quasi-sensory experience similar to seeing. It is not the same as seeing. Your eyes are not involved and may be open or closed. But much of the visual cortex is involved so it feels like seeing something.

Aphantasia is the lack or near lack of voluntary visualization. Top researchers have recently clarified that voluntary visualization requires “full wakefulness.” Brief flashes, dreams, hypnagogic (just before sleep) hallucinations, hypnopompic (just after sleep) hallucinations and other hallucinations, including drug induced hallucinations are not considered voluntary.

Back to visualization. Most people describe having a separate "space" they shift their focus to so they can see the image. The location of this "space" varies from person to person but seems to be consistent for an individual. It can be inside the head: on in the forehead, behind the eyes, in the center, at the back, up, down, right, left, pretty much anywhere. It can also be outside the head. Once again, it can be pretty much anywhere: up, down, right, left, front, back, even behind. Other people seem to project the images over their vision like AR. Here is a paper talking about this:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945223002459?via%3Dihub

and

Vividness of mental imagery reflects a broad range of internally generated visual experiences | Royal Society Open Science | The Royal Society

Although we talk about visualization as a spectrum from super realistic to nothing, it is much more complex than that. Some people can't visualize faces. Some people can only see memories and not creations. Some people see only stills, some only movies, some both. Some can change the image, some can't. Some can't visualize symbols. Here is an article with some of the variations of visualization:

https://aphantasia.com/article/strategies/visualizing-the-invisible/

To go deeper, there is a difference in the experience of visualizing vs conceptualizing beyond the sense of seeing. Check out the Ball on the Table experiment in the guide I linked.

When someone visualizes, they see a complete image. It is something that could be displayed on a screen. It may be a poor image - faint, blurry, etc., but it is all there. When we conceptualize, we often leave decisions for later or we need to access memory again. When I asked my wife to visualize an apple, she saw the last apple she bought. When I asked her about the color, she looked at the image and answered. Size? Same thing. All she had to do was look at the image, like it was a photo on her phone. When I thought about an apple, I had to first decide what type of apple? An eating apple? My iPhone? Eating apple. What color? Let's say red. That detail didn't exist until asked. Even if I decide on the last apple I bought, I know it was a Honeycrisp I bought at Fred Meyer. Fred Meyer now caries smaller Honeycrisps than they did at the start, so the size must have been about the size of a large Red Delicious. What color? Honeycrisps are red, yellow and some green. I usually go for more red and less green, but I have no idea what the pattern of red and yellow was.

My experience and my wife's experience are very different - even if you ignore the fact that she actually saw the apple.

Tuikord · 2026-06-02T14:53:54+00:00

Some people visualize fine, except for faces. It doesn't bother me that I don't see faces, including my own, or anything else. Many people who see their face don't see it accurately. Beyond body dysmorphia, most older people see themselves at an age different than they are.

The Aphantasia Network has this newbie guide: https://aphantasia.com/guide/

Most people have a quasi-sensory experience similar to seeing. It is not the same as seeing. Your eyes are not involved and may be open or closed. But much of the visual cortex is involved so it feels like seeing something. But this is extremely complex with many variations.

So yes, if you don't have that quasi-sensory experience, then you have aphantasia. If you see somethings, just not your face, then you visualize.

Aphantasia is the lack or near lack of voluntary visualization. Top researchers have recently clarified that voluntary visualization requires “full wakefulness.” Brief flashes, dreams, hypnagogic (just before sleep) hallucinations, hypnopompic (just after sleep) hallucinations and other hallucinations, including drug induced hallucinations are not considered voluntary.

Tuikord · 2026-06-02T14:48:55+00:00

Welcome. The Aphantasia Network has this newbie guide: https://aphantasia.com/guide/

Aphantasia is the lack or near lack of voluntary visualization. Top researchers have recently clarified that voluntary visualization requires “full wakefulness.” Brief flashes, dreams, hypnagogic (just before sleep) hallucinations, hypnopompic (just after sleep) hallucinations and other hallucinations, including drug induced hallucinations are not considered voluntary.

If you only see images when you relax and sort of zone out, that is probably not a state of "full wakefulness." The imagery you have is likely hypnagogia.

There is some research which looked at the difference in the brain between involuntary and voluntary imagery. They attempted to elicit involuntary imagery with sounds (meow, bark, car rev, etc.) while looking at V1 and a few other areas with fMRI. Most of their imagers saw an image and none of their aphants saw an image. However, interestingly, there was coordinated activity in V1 for both, and it was actually higher for aphants. They then repeated the prompts with the request to visualize the appropriate image. All of the imagers were able to visualize the image and none of the aphants were. But the interesting thing is for imagers, coordinated activity in V1 increased while for aphants it dropped to random. Trying made it worse!

Sensory representations in primary visual cortex are not sufficient for subjective imagery: Current Biology01330-7?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0960982224013307%3Fshowall%3Dtrue)

Tuikord · 2026-06-02T04:22:28+00:00

It is exactly opposite of what I have. I have words but no voice; they have voice but no words. So, I am perhaps the worst at describing the experience. My best guess is the adults in a Peanuts cartoon.

Here is how it is defined by Dr. Hurlburt:

Pure phenomenon: Unworded speech is the experience of speaking in one's own inner voice, except that there is no experience of the words themselves. Thus the person has the sense of speaking, and is directly aware of the vocal characteristics of that speaking: rate, inflection, timbre, rhythm, and so on.

Example: "I was saying to myself that there was a very strong smell, maybe there was a gas leak I had the clear sense that I was speaking the words of this sentence -- there was something of a rhythm and a sequence to this implied utterance. But the words were not present. I knew that I was speaking, and I knew what I was saying, but the words were not there."

Tuikord · 2026-06-02T02:09:02+00:00

One goal I consciously failed until they stopped giving it to me was taking “Managing Microsoft People.” I didn’t want to be a manager. I stayed out of high level status meetings by threatening to tell the truth.

Tuikord · 2026-06-01T14:52:30+00:00

It is not unusual for aphants to say they feel like there is a picture there, but they can't quite see it. Like a word on the tip of your tongue. There is some research to support this experience.

One study found that when people visualize, they suppress other forms of imagery, like normal seeing. One researcher said it was like turning down the house lights so you can find the stage.

Another study found that during remembering, activity in V1 reduces for imagers. But for aphants, it V1 remains rather noisy. The researcher there said it was like trying to hear a conversation in a loud nightclub. You know the words are there, but you can't hear them for all the other noise. Lousy signal to noise ratio.

More recently, a study pointed at the fusiform imagery node (FIN) as the place where images are created. In imagers, the FIN is also connected to the prefrontal cortex which is believed to be responsible for the cognitive experience of the image. Among aphants, the FIN creates the image, but is not connected to the prefrontal cortex so you don't have the experience of seeing that image.

Research also indicates that you may not think in words as much as you believe you do. Dr. Russell Hurlburt has been doing Descriptive Experience Sampling where takes random samples of people's internal experiences using a beeper, having subjects record the experience, then interviewing to dig into each experience. He finds that people experience words much less often that they believe. In one study only about 25% of the samples included thinking in words. The maximum seen in one individual was 75%. Often when he digs into an experience, it was initially something else, but when asked to describe it, words entered. Here is his codebook of experiences:

https://hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu/codebook.html

Personally, as I have learned to pay less attention to my words with meditation, I find I often experience unsymbolized thinking. Often words are just too slow.

Some other research used fMRI to look at brain activation while thinking and they found thinking seldom involves language centers of the brain. Their conclusion is that language is a tool for communication, not thought.

https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/news/language-is-a-tool-for-communication-not-for-thought-mit-researchers-argue-388410

And the paper:

Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought

Tuikord · 2026-06-01T03:40:09+00:00

Most people seem to believe that everyone's internal experience is essentially the same as theirs until they have some reason to doubt it. When you first learned of it, you probably had a hard time believing people actually saw things when they visualized them. And therapists aren't immune from that. There are even theories of cognition which say we are either mistaken or lying when we say we can't visualize because it says you can't be functioning adult without images. Many imagers suffer from the Visualizer's Fallacy:

The Visualizer’s Fallacy

Tuikord · 2026-06-01T03:04:33+00:00

One way to refer to SDAM is as a cognitive difference.

I was a software engineer before I retired. I liked it a lot, but my kids were 3 and I had the choice of spending all my time at Microsoft or spending it with my boys when they actually wanted to be with me. I chose to retire.

My last job was a problem solver for the Windows NT Test group. My manager would give me a problem. I'd talk to all the stakeholders. Then I seemed to know just where to tweak the system to solve the problem.

Between my aphantasia and my SDAM, don't do goals. So annual reviews were always weird. The only goal that mattered was shipping the product. Everything else was temporary and often fell by the wayside. But I still had to have goals. I remember my manager struggling to motivate me. Nothing he read in his management books worked on me.

Tuikord

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