cross-posted from: https://lemmy.eco.br/post/13513868
this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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I've got aphantasia and honestly the comic kinda reminds me of how I feel 'left out' but I also spent most of my life trying to draw and only found out about the term a few years ago making me realize I spent so much time following a dead end. that's just a me thing tho
Oh, no, that's not a dead end! Holding mental focus is a skill you develop and you can practice it, and doing exercises specifically for that will help you learn to draw
I should preface this by saying that this is just my opinion and that I may be completely wrong.
I'm convinced that for 99% of people thinking they have aphantasia, it's just a miscommunication about what it means to "see" something in your mind. When people picture something in their mind, they can't literally see it in the way that they would see something with their eyes. Seeing something in your mind is just having an understanding of what it would look like.
People will say that they can "see" whatever you're asking them to "picture" but they only ever hold an understanding of what the thing would look like. This understanding can be elaborate but there is not actually an experience that could be perhaps better described as a visual hallucination.
If you visualize a cube in your mind, you don't actually see it. You just understand where all the lines, faces, and vertices would be. If you rotate it in your mind, you understand how those angles and the appearance would change at each moment as it rotates. You can even superimpose where these lines would go onto something you're looking at, but still you don't actually see it there, you just understand how you would perceive it, where the edges would go, what it would obstruct.
The reason that I'm convinced that people only hold concepts and visual understanding in their minds and not actual images is that most people are pretty bad at drawing. When people do start drawing, they create a representation of the sparse landmarks that actually made up their visual idea and then they have to start filling in the details using reasoning and logic. Artists and people who practice drawing get better at this, are more attentive to detail and learn techniques to make more convincing images. If people actually saw complete images in their minds, they'd be far easier to recreate and I think everyone would be more artistically inclined.
Furthermore, unlike "seeing" when you picture something while conscious, I think dreams actually do include visual hallucinations that can seem similar to actual visual perception.
It's not as clear as real vision, but if I close my eyes I can really "see" a visual image of the thing I'm thinking of.
Really like a "visual hallucination" as you said, but it clearly exists in, how can I say? "Another space"?
It doesn't automatically translate to the muscle movements required to draw it.
Interesting. Maybe if there's a spectrum of ability for visualizing things, I'm just closer to aphantasia than I am to vivid mental images which rival visual perception.
I think that's the case. It's definitely a spectrum.
Yes it is. People on the opposite spectrum of Aphantasia have what is called hyperphantasia.
People can't even draw stuff that is sitting in front of them, in real life, unless they've practiced. There's a lot more involved in drawing than just knowing what something looks like.
Not being flippant here: If you can actually see it, why not just see it on the paper and essentially trace what you see?
I can't speak for others, but it's not overlaid like that. It's like a separate visual part of my brain.
Because that's not how drawing works.
edit: Thinking about it, it might be good to expand on that a bit. Unfortunately I can't. It really is "it doesn't work like that" and I am unable to explain how it does work. I draw, I don't write, sorry.
I understand that drawing doesn't work that way. What I'm suggesting is that drawing doesn't work that way because visualizing something in your mind is so far removed from actually seeing it.
For example, you could imagine that you want to paint a lake with mountains. You can get an idea of how you'll compose the image, what the colors are, how the strokes might make textures on the canvas, all the details. It's more than just knowing the facts of each object, color, line. It's an understanding of how it will look visually and you "picturre it" but it's nowhere close to the sensory experience of actually looking at the finished painting.
This is my experience, at least.
Sounds like somoene with aphantasia would say.
But jokes aside, it's most likely a significan difference since people with aphantasia would lack the physical reaction to inner images.
For example, when a normal person is asked to imagine a bright light source, a slight dilation of pupil can be noticed. Kinda shocking to find out that tbh.
Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9018072/
I have aphantasia. I definitely cannot rotate a cube in my mind. I can with great effort and concentration kind of do what you describe, follow where individual edges and vertices would be in space relative to each other, but normally it would just be the idea in my head "there's a cube and it's rotating".
My go to test for aphantasia goes like this:
People always answer with color and many times with a more detailed visual description, like texture, material, the surrounding scene, etc. I personally would very stumped by that question because when asked to imagine a circle, I just imagine the concept of a circle. It has no color, no texture, no substance.
I mean, I don't have aphantasia, and if you ask me to imagine a circle, with no other details, I won't get most of that either right away. If anything I guess I'd tend to "see" it as a black thin outline, i guess because that's how it appears commonly in math problem figures. But I certainly wouldn't make up a texture or material for it if it wasn't mentioned.
Now if you're talking about a green and red tartan circle that smells like rotten cheese, yeah sure, I can summon that.
Yeah, a circle by itself isn't an object that actually exists in real space, but a geometric concept, so I don't imagine more than black lines if not given any other information. Same with a square, triangle, etc.
Huh.
Is the association with the word circle? Like, what does the concept of a circle involve?
The infinite sharpness of its edge, the rigid but smooth change of direction as you move along it. The feeling you get when you see a circle. The concept of rolling.
… but primarily just circle-ness.
For me, "imagine a circle" is kind of a meaningless instruction until you follow it up with something
Very insightful! No pun intended.
Ok, I'll add my personal experience here. When I imagine something, like an apple, my perception of the imagined object ranges from a rather blurry apple to a very detailed apple, but anyway I do peceive it very visually. It's definitely not just understanding in my case. I perceive the color, the shape, movements if need be, everything. When I do this, the normal perception coming from my eyes kind of shuts down and I only concentrate on "seeing" the thing I imagine, but if I focus I can also imagine something being somewhere in a real lication I see with my eyes, so then it feels a bit like AR. I've read somewhere that the same centers in the brain are active when you imagine something and when you see it, so you could say it's a kind of deliberate visual hallucination. I can also do this with music - I can play it in my head and enjoy hearing it.