What is Aphantasia?

In the below linked episode from Youtube Channel "Ihm Curious", titled "Aphantasia: Why 'Blind Imagination' Could Be the Key to Understanding Consciousness," Dr. Hakwan Lau and the host discuss how aphantasia may present a useful model to study consciousness. This is because it presents a clear case where researchers can separate an organism's "meaningful response to stimuli," from "subjective experience."

I won't steal any more thunder from the video (go take a look), it's an interesting topic.

YouTube

Subjective Experiences Compared

Having watched that episode, I found myself genuinely wondering if I have the condition, ultimately somewhat unable to immediately reach a conclusion.

I was puzzled by my hesitation to immediately decide. I realized I don't have a frame of reference, other than actual reality, against which to gauge whether my subjective experience of my imagination matches that of others. I only have a statement that others' experiences are like reality. Yet, some people state it's not exactly reality.

... ok? How much less like reality is it?

Side note: Language! What a beautiful invention without which we would not have the ability to describe abstract immaterial (non-material?) concepts like aphantasia.

Quantifying Aphantasia

Have there been attempts to quantify or systematize aphantasia? Yep.

VVIQ Scorecard

My Experience of Aphantasia

In my case, I believe I have a variable experience of the condition, usually a 1 on the VVIQ scale, sometimes ranging into a 2 while conscious, but closer to a 4 or even a 5 during certain semi-sleep states.

Some descriptions at the above link discuss having knowledge that the object is being imagined without having the subjective experience of seeing the object. On another site I've found: "Others [with aphantasia] experience dreams as a knowledge or awareness of sensory events, but without the accompanying mental imagery".

I find this description somewhat unsatisfying and dry. It also does not seem to directly relate to my own flavor of the experience, which is as follows:

When I attempt to picture an apple, I have an almost synesthetic sense of the roundness of the apple. In my mind, it feels a little like when you are in a familiar room of your house and there is a blackout. Immediately after the lights have gone out, there is a type of afterimage hanging around. For me, it looks a bit like a photographic negative of the scene--but not in a strongly visual sense. I relate the experience also to that of proprioception, where there is hard to pin-down knowledge of how the elements in the scene will behave in relation to my body, and to each other.

Do I see red? No. Sort of. It's almost more like I know that I know that apples are red so this apple must be red, without any of those gymnastics. It's red, but not because I see red. That is, unless I'm having one of those particularly lucid early morning dreams .. then, I'm seeing a red apple. It even tastes good. Those are my cases that range into 4 or 5.

During the block object rotation examples in the Ihm Curious episode, I found myself just "knowing" or "feeling" which objects were rotations of each other because, they "fit". I was also conscious of a separate verification process I was going through in my head, mostly to confirm the felt solution, which existed separately. This verification process I was consciously performing consisted of understanding the rotation of the first block in the figure and then quickly zipping through the rest of the blocks to confirm their overlap against the pictured proposed solution. This process was a "visualization" of sorts, but the kind you think your colleague is having when they twist their hand in the air to describe how something needs to be screwed into another thing.

When imaginging "the precise carriage, length of step, etc. in walking, [of a friend]" (a question from VVIQ), I find myself unwilling to select "No image at all, you only 'know' that you are thinking of the object." Rather, I have a sense for the person and I am experiencing their swagger or gait in some visceral sense; just not explicitly a visual one.

Aphantasia and Consciousness

As I mentioned, researchers are interested in using people with Aphantasia to study consciousness. The reason for this is that it offers a rare case where we can differentiate between meaningful reactions to stimuli vs subjective experience of similar stimuly.

When I first heard this statement, I was a bit confused by it. After all, if a researcher is comparing the reactions of an individual with Aphantasia (let's call them person A) to those of one without it (let's call them person B), how can the researcher differentiate between the portion of the reaction which is due to the additional objective stimulus of the actual visualization in the non-aphantasic person, from that which in fact arises from the subjective part?

Answer: Presumably if B has a statistically significant response that A does not share, across enough trials and enough A's and B's, then the researcher may be able to conclude that the reaction arises from processes that require real inputs (objective stimuli/experience).

From this example we can also see how experiments constrained to a single "A" or to a group of exclusively aphantasic subjects would be helpful: Researchers can compare the reaction to stimuli based on only asking the subject to imagine an apple, to their reactions when actually being shown an apple. In an aphantasic person, differences might be attributable to objective vs subjective processing of stimuli.

However, I would want to ask the researchers about whether the concept of subjective experience is, well, ... subjective; and therefore, whether subjective reactions may mimic objective ones well enough to be indistinguishable. In other words, such experiments may in fact fail to find differences based on measurable traits of subjects' reactions. Put another way, who's to say that those with aphantasia aren't displaying all the same elements that would have occurred from an objective experience in their subjective experience (save of course, only for the actual lack of the "mind's eye" visual experience)?

Blackness With Sense

In summary, for me aphantasia does not involve "blackness" but rather "blackness plus an intuitive experience of object presence." I find the words used in VVIQ's score 1 ("knowing that I'm thinking about the object,") unsatisfying. What I experience is not a kind of meta-cognition of the interaction with the object or of the task being performed. I don't experience logical steps distinct from those I would anyway experience (in reality).

Is it red? yes ... without "computing" the answer.

I.e., my experience tends to include a materialized "solution" to the stimulus that is immediately accessible, known, and "queriable." For me, it does not involve (at least consciously) a process where I "fetch" the answer to a question like "what's the color of the object?" (at least, not when the prompt involves an object that has a known color in nature).

Final Words

If you have aphantasia, I hope this relatively more detailed description of one person's (my) experience will provide some context for you. If you have any comments about this topic, please feel free to reach me in the comments of this LinkedIn post: LinkedIn post

© 2024 Andrew Athan