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AI bro discovering imagination
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this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
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It blows my mind that some people can't visualize things in their mind. I can see anything I'd like to in remarkable detail, and often explore old places or properties from my childhood when I'm trying to fall asleep. I would be kind of crushed if I suddenly couldn't.
see the thing is I can't even tell if I can do this or not
like I can think of something and know the shape and quality of it, but I don't see it in my mind
I'm a mechanical designer, I design tooling and machines all day, and my hobbies include woodworking and 3D printing functional stuff. right now I'm thinking of the design of a kumiko lamp, and the grid pattern I want to use, but I just don't see it. it's the same with the essentially lego tooling I design at work, I know this block has this shape and connects to this other one with this surface, and the assembly of 10 parts looks like whatever, but I do not see that shape when I think about it. it's more that I know the description of it
I can lucid dream, though, so that's pretty sweet
Yeah, pretty much the same here. I can imagine shapes, smells, textures, whatever, but it's entirely different from seeing, smelling, or touching. Concepts, not images. Feels like the same part of the brain I'd use to, for instance, write a computer program. No issues visualising and designing 3D models either, or imagining what something in a book looks like.
Same when dreaming; I could describe everything in my dreams (if I had time during the few seconds after waking up when I still remember them) as if I had seen, heard, and felt it... but it was a completely different experience from actually seeing, hearing, or feeling it. Which means I can never mistake a dream for reality (which I suppose means I lucid dream too), because it's immediately obviously different (and I'm on the bed, with my eyes closed).
yep, I saw reference to books somewhere else, mentioning that do people not picture what they read or what
I've always been an avid reader, and I have no trouble conceptualizing what I am reading. but I can't picture it. I can relate it to other similar things I've seen. I can understand what a thoroughly described bridge in a forest looks like. I don't see it.
I used to have the same question. What finally convinced me was imagining an apple sitting on a table. When I try to imagine specific parts (e.g. the stem, or the specular shine on its skin, or water beads on its side) I can actually see that part of the apple in my head, and the images change when I change the color, form etc.
See, if I imagine an apple there's no images. There's just... the concept of an apple, I suppose.
I know what an image of it would look like. I know what light shining on it (photorealistic, phong, gouraud, take your pick), or water beads on its side would look like. I could draw it for you, if I didn't suck at drawing. Make a decent vector image of it, sure, with the right software.
But I don't see it. I'd need eyes for that, and my eyes point towards the outside of my brain, not the inside.
Yeah, my imagination area does not overlap with my visual field. My imagination area is fully-featured, but not normally interestingly-populated until I decide to (day)dream or will myself to do visualization exercises.
Out of curiousity, if I put an apple infront of you for you to look at and then had you close your eyes, could you see that apple?
Not see it, no. I could describe it, from memory, if I had looked at it for long enough and paid enough attention (especially if I knew beforehand I'd have to describe it), but obviously I wouldn't be seeing it. There'd be no image, just a memory.
I'm pretty certain the visual processing parts of the brain are not involved when I imagine or remember stuff.
I mean, there's a lot of image processing going on in the retina and optic nerve (edge detection, contrast highlighting, and whatnot) that's obviously not available when not using the eyes (which makes it very hard for me to imagine how this seeing images in your brain thing works), then a lot of spatial and temporal signal processing (motion detection, noise reduction, speed classification, and so on) in the thalamus, then there's several layers of visual cortex doing the rest of the image processing, pattern recognition, and whatnot, and then there's the rest of the brain (mainly prefrontal cortex and parietal and temporal lobes), which actually deals with that information, stores it, recalls it, and whatnot.
I imagine the whole retina-thalamus-visual cortex bit isn't significantly involved in the way I "visualise" stuff, while it might be more involved for people who "see images" in their brains.
All the processed stuff (concepts, descriptions, dimensions, spatial and temporal relationships, and whatnot) is still there, though, just not the raw visual data (which would be superfluous in most cases anyway, unless I was trying to do something like recall a written page I hadn't read in order to read it later, which I can't do but you or someone with photographic memory might), so I've got everything I need anyway.
Damn, that’s wild. Kinda cool, though, that a remembered description is enough to be able to recognize things.
I can read a page I never read before, but there are times where the visual memory help fill in the gaps. When I read music and play it later I’ll do that, where I essentially read the music again, though I find that can actually be a little slow and limiting at times but it has its uses.
yeah I've tried the apple thing a few times a year for the past few years, and not once have I felt like I was seeing it. I just think of the outline of an apple, maybe how the light would reflect off it, and of a colour. all separate
I just imagine past apples I have seen, and it's really hard to hold onto one specific apple.
I couldn't possibly remember specific apples.
I could describe to you the Granny Smith variety (the only one I like), or maybe the Golden or Gala (the other varieties common in supermarkets around here), but not particular apples, unless I had actually tried to memorize their details (which would look like a list, not an image).
Maybe I don't care enough about apples.
I could describe my old pets (I did care enough about them to remember them), but, again, that'd look more like a list.
why did that convince you? if i imagine an apple on a table i am unable to tell i "see" it or if i "know" it based on all the properties i know it should have. like, is it a mental image or a description mapped into some sort of imagined space?
For me it's a mental image, which is definitely distinct from a collection of descriptions. I don't really know how to describe it, but it feels like my head uses circuitry close to other visual circuitry while I'm focusing on this kind of mental image. Almost like the mental image is "injected" into hardware/software used for other visual processing.
For me, the best way I can describe what it feels like for me is: I can imagine an apple and I get a feeling as if I was seeing it, but I don't actually see it. I don't see an image in front of me. I only feel like I'm seeing an image, and I have to focus pretty hard to see anything in detail, but I can still use it to, for example, try and manipulate something in 3D, or try to remember what I was doing on a given day by trying to walk back through a place. I don't know under what category that makes me fall under.
That's regular.
Hrm, AFAIK that is the norm. I'm not sure people can actually create their own augmented reality.
I suspect that I am someone who has aphantasia (inability to visualise stuff) and it's weird, because I only relatively recently realised that it was a thing that I likely had. I knew it was a thing in general much before this, but it didn't occur to me that it could apply to me, because surely that isn't just something you can just not notice about yourself. It turns out that yeah, actually, it can be something you don't notice, because if you've lived that way your entire life, you have nothing to compare against.
As a comparison, I am autistic and struggle with sensory hypersensitivity, as many autistic people do. Loud sounds and bright lights literally hurt me, and for a large chunk of my life, I didn't realise that I was literally experiencing the world differently to other people; I thought that everyone felt this discomfort, but I was the only one making a fuss out of it. It really blew my mind when I was diagnosed as a teenager and realised that not only was I experiencing stuff that most people weren't, that there may well be countless other ways in which my fundamental perceptions and cognition could be different, and I'd have no way of knowing.
Shit's trippy as hell.
That reminds me of a thought I already had as a teenager. We perceive the world through our senses. But there could be countless other "things" happening around us which we simply aren't able to perceive with our limited senses.
There are.
We can't see magnetism. Or most of the electromagnetic spectrum.
We can't hear too low frequency or too high frequency sounds.
We can't perceive gravity (other than by its effect on our body), or the strong or weak nuclear forces.
There's a flood of neutrinos constantly going through us without us noticing.
There are whole ecosystems of minuscule animals and bacteria living on and in us, which we can't see.
We can't even see the very air we're breathing.
Yeah, I skipped this part of the thought. So we know there are and then there could be countless others we have no idea of.
Same. I genuinely don't understand what life is like without this. If I need to remember that there's a specific thing in the basement, I'm visualizing what's in the basement and looking at each thing. Do these people just like have an actual list in their head for this?
if I'm not at home and need to walk my spouse through something like checking for a tripped breaker, I'm visualizing the whole process so I can explain it in detail. How does the other side do this? No judgement, I'm genuinely curious how it works.
Open the breaker.
It's on the left side (if I remember that much due to it happening a lot)
It will look like it's not aligned with everything else, find it and flip it back on.
Not that hard.
The fact that someone could “look at a memory” and spot new things in it is astonishing to me. I didn’t think it went that far, I thought everyone would remember the list, and could recreate the picture from the list… remembering the picture independently or instead of the list… wow.
Oh no, the things you place in the memory trigger connection to the thing to be remembered. But it goes both ways, which is why I use things like crates of (12) beers that already have numbers baked in to the system.
I don't know for sure that I'm on the other side
that said...
I can visualize processes just fine. let's say I want to instruct someone on how to chisel out a feature on a piece of wood. I can give them exact instructions on how to do that, because I know where the tool needs to be and where their hands need to be and what material needs to be removed. but I don't really picture any of that in 3D, I just... know it as a description of the 3D. if that makes sense
I just can't visualize a process to walk you through it. Like on the PC I have to just do it myself or do it at the same time so I can tell you what to do. There is no list, I just remember (or don't) if something is there kinda intuitively. I think my memory is pretty good. I can picture absolutely nothing. It's just all black. It's not even all that bad. To me it's just normal.
Since aphantasia is a bit of a spectrum, I have it to a decent degree as I can only imagine blurry images in my head. I only learned about it doing some psychological testing when it was a test my psychologist wanted me to take. I can only speak for myself as I don't know anyone else with the same kind of condition IRL, but in general I just sort of memorize task order for repetitive things. I imagine you do the same, but you have visual cues memorized in the same way I just know the steps to do something. It's not like I don't recognize what I'm looking at when it's in front of me. I tend to think of it as having to be very analytical when doing one of those "spot the difference" image puzzles. I know both images have a potted plant, but it's easier if I have them side by side to know that one was a succulent and the other was a fern. I don't know if that analogy helps you. I don't know what it's like to have a vivid visual imagination, so it's the best metaphor I can think of at the moment.
I have done remote tech support for software that I wrote which was pretty difficult if I couldn't look at it myself locally. At least for me, I can know the properties of something such as a friend having long, red hair, but I couldn't just visualize their face. I would still recognize them immediately when I see them. If it's something like a tripped breaker, I just know to tell the person which room to go into and what a tripped breaker will look like so they can identify it themselves. It's not like you don't have a memory, but for me the visual parts of those memories are just too blurry to describe that way.
I can read fiction just fine, but it helps if the characters are illustrated in some kind of way so I know what I'm supposed to imagine while the action is happening. That could even just be a single picture of cover art. At least for me, I can still picture a cobblestone street, but I sort of just see a lot of beige or gray things in my mind with almost no definition. From reading online of the 1-5 scale of aphantasia and comparing it to the test results I got back in percentages, I think I'm somewhere between a 3 and a 4 for levels of intensity if that helps to clarify my perspective at all.
Apologies for the essay response, but I hope it helps to understand! If it's any consolation, I find it kind of ironically hilarious that I can't imagine having a vivid imagination.
ETA: It looks like the original test used 1 as completely unable to imagine things and 5 to a vivid imagination. That scale was flipped for the second version of the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire. My scale of 1-5 is based on the second edition, I am on the lower end of the spectrum of vividness, but I can still sort of imagine things to a certain degree.
No apologies necessary - thanks for this. We can't ever be in each other's heads to experience how each other thinks, so this is amazing.
Have you ever heard of the mnemonic device of a "memory palace"? Can you do this? Or would it not work for you?
I appreciate that outlook on life!
I have heard of the concept as a “mind palace”, but I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I just assumed it was a meme. I’ll try to practice it a bit to remember something. My mind sort of works like this with word or concept associations already, but it’s much less organized than this concept. As I can visualize blurry images, it might work to some degree.
My career is in various areas of software development, and learning to make diagrams with tools like Mermaid really helped me because I can struggle to visualize the diagrams I want to create. Since you just type out the connections you want to make programmatically, it allows me to make diagrams more easily than with any kind of visual tools. Hopefully that clarifies what I mean by thinking in concept associations already rather than visualizations.
If you’re familiar with the podcast No Such Thing As A Fish, one of the hosts (James Harkin) has aphantasia and discussed it in an episode within the last few months that quite a few animators at Pixar experience the condition as well. I also assumed when I learned about it that it was why I’m terrible with visual arts. It would seem that’s not a good excuse.
Associations are very similar to psychoanalysis concepts. There's a wide range of ways of thinking. I can sometimes think the way you do. Thought and structure is like a routine, carving mental structure. The ways we are taught and lived can really impact the way we think.
Thanks for the perspective! And I will check out the podcast, thank you.
The memory palace really works. I had a combination lock in grad school and used that method to memorize the combo. 38 is 3 crates of beer with 2 bottles on top, 24 was 2 dozen doughnuts, and 30 somehow got associated with a plant. Which I placed in a cubicle in a set of 6 from the place I worked before grad school. Still remember it more than a decade later.
I tried this a few times as a kid after watching Dreamcatcher, so granted this was a long time ago, but my memory of how this went was basically the same as everything else I've said in this thread - I remember the route, I can picture the layout (but not the details), but I was never able to associate memories to a certain location.
but to be fair I've never met anybody who actually did this anyways
I was able to use it for a while, but didn't really need to after a year or two. Google Docs and Keep made it an obsolete method.
so if I say cube, you don't immediately see it (not even if you close your eyes) and can't then turn said cube in all 3 axis visually in your headspace?
If it's a completely grey cube, I can sort of imagine it, but it's like I can't smoothly rotate it or visualize things like lighting or shades of grey. It's sort of like just seeing it jump from one angle to the next with a lot of the angles just not "showing up" in my mind, and they aren't really connected images. I couldn't visualize movements on a Rubik's cube, but that's not the same as not being able to run the algorithm and solve it with my hands. For clarity, I don't know the algorithm to solve one, but I mean the colors aren't something I can really imagine on the cube. Like I said, I don't have complete aphantasia, so this is solely my experience. I don't know if that's just me or purely the aphantasia.
fascinating. thx for sharing!
You're welcome! It's not something I really think about often as it really doesn't affect my day to day life in a meaningful way, but I'm happy to help clarify it a bit for others! I was extremely confused when I found out people can just fully imagine an apple or something with loads of detail. Haha.
I think my aphantasia is at one on any scale. I cannot imagine a cube at all, but the other direction is not a problem. The instant I see a cube I know that it is one.
I can draw a cube based off remembered facts, having noticed things like perspective and angles and how dice work over many years. There is nothing in my mind that I am trying to reproduce on the paper, but I will know it when I see it.
That’s really interesting. That’s more or less how it is for me. I know to draw two overlapping-but-offset squares and to connect the corresponding corners with a line, but I can sort of visualize the concept of a cube more than the cube itself. I also can generally instantly recognize a cube on paper if I see one.
When you think about a memory, do you see anything at all visually? I can imagine a very blurry image, but the actions feel like it’s stop motion and very out of focus. I just have to sort of know or have an intuition for what the objects may be. As an example, I know the first vehicle I drove and the physical details, but visualizing it only shows a sort of rough, dark outline that I can’t place any of those details on or even really describe them in enough detail that someone else could draw it.
no, I just know what it looks like, and if I think about rotating it, it just jumps from one perspective to the next because I know what those perspectives should look like
I can think about how the light reflects off it as it rotates smoothly, and I know what that would look like, but I don't actually visualize it happening