To ask if you see pictures in your "mind's eye"?

[MakeItRain]

I was reading about "aphantasia" and realised that it applies to me to a large extent. It's when you have no visual pictures going on in your head. So if someone says "imagine a beach, what can you see?" I was shocked to realise that some people can see the whole beach with colour and detail. Where even is this picture? I get a sort of vague sense of sand and waves, but no detail or colour. I realised it's probably linked to my appalling ability to recall faces.
What do you see if you're asked to "imagine a beach?"

I can see the beaches I've visited, both stony and sandy.

I have a photographic memory, though. If I wrote a shopping list it doesn't matter if I forget to take it with me because I can already see it.

@Dugup well I just know what I did. I don’t have to see it!

@LovePeonies that’s how everyone thinks. People don’t talk to themselves internally

İ can imagine things i have seen before if my eyes are open. However when I close them i can think of something and i know what it looks like but I can't 'see' it. İt is just black with random flashes of colour and light. İ never knew this was a thing until a couple of years ago. İ used to get frustrated. Especially at school when we had to do visualisation exercises and i couldn't do it and didn't know why everyone else wasn't getting stressed about it.

I can visualise very well. I see picture cards as reminders of things I need from the shop - so say bread milk and oranges - I imagine breakfast of toast tea and orange juice

I can imagine lying on a beach it’s warm and relaxing I can smell the sea

My daughter pictures things in colour like days of the week or months of the year

She is a friend the same as you who can’t picture anything. She’s extremely bright and achieved 11 A* at GCSE

This is strange. Do you think this is something we can practice and get better at or is it just as it is?
I used to love reading and would always be absorbed in the world of the book. It would be like a film.
I can’t do that anymore. Now I have very vague images and prefer dialogue and action, like a pp.
I’m also not good with faces but I’m ok once I’ve met someone 3 times.

I just tried to think of a beach With my eyes closed. I can vaguely see beaches I’ve been to but if I try and think of an imaginary one it’s just darkness.

Oops posted too soon.

I do have a constant internal monologue going on though,m.

Oh yes internal monologue is continuous. that alone gives me a headache sometimes

Oh dear! First post didn’t post at all!

I can’t visualise at all! I didn’t realise that people actually saw pictures in their head!! That must be awesome!

Am I weird??

I am similar. I can only summon up very vague, fuzzy, dark images and I have to really concentrate to get even that. I can't picture my dh or dc either, to the extent that I can't even remember what colour their hair is or what they were wearing earlier in the day. When I think of them I can only see a moving figure but I can hear their voices.

When I remember events etc I can hear the sounds, for example thinking of the BBQ tonight I hear the voices of the people there with a very vague image of the scene as a whole. Remembering what I did yesterday or last week then I just narrate it to myself. I can however remember and picture details from my childhood such as the seashell dolls and the steel knight things that held the rakes and pokers next to the fireplace in my nannan's living room.

I get lost very easily and don't remember routes at all and I think that's down to my lack of an imagination.

My dreams are very vivid, colourful and realistic though, strangely.

@MakeItRain I have aphantasia, for years I thought ‘picturing in your mind’ was just a turn of phrase. I was genuinely devastated when I learnt that other people can see and imagine in their minds, but I’m ok with it not. At the time it felt like an awful loss to realise I couldn’t do it. However we all function differently, and for what it’s worth I’m a successful visual artist and make my living from creating images! I just feel them as a concept before I create them.

Interestingly though after my father died I had a dream in which I saw his face in absolute perfect detail to the point that I reached out and was about to touch it when I woke up. So I know my brain CAN see these images, but for whatever reason chooses not to when I’m awake.

The only way I can do these things is by thinking of a photo. yes, that's me as well.

Yes I have a very vivid mind's eye...and internal monologue...which sometimes goes off on its own little journey 😂 Like just now reading all these beach descriptions, my 'mind' conjured up a scene from the Disney version of the Little Mermaid and my monologue is playing 'Under The Sea' in the voice of Sebastian 🤦‍♀️

@nosnugglesforyou You're wrong, some people really do have an internal monologue where they talk to themselves constantly, and that is their framework for 'thinking'.

My DH is one of them.

@Dugup I’m not sure how my memory is stored, but the first thing that appears that I can put words to is feelings, followed closely by location, then words and then images. The images are not generally what I saw but made up images from a birds eye view. Or sometimes a cartoon of what was actually there.

Maybe like a smartphone using emojis, words and maps rather than the camera?

I think everyone probably stores feelings, sounds, images and data (position, names etc) to different extents. Very few people can store a conversation verbatim for example. I think my sound and data storage is excellent because I don’t store images well. My positional memory is excellent, and in some ways I’m a visual learner because I can tell you where on a page I read information.

I do store images but they are like “platos forms” or diagrams. So although I can’t picture my walk this afternoon, I could draw you some of the views I saw. It wouldn’t be accurate but the relative positions of objects and people would be correct. I can “picture“ the three oak tree seedlings that I saw today, but on closer inspection they are all just generic oak leaves on a stick!

After a head injury I started learning memory "tricks" that involve visualisation. Being totally unable to picture something is very rare, most people will get a vague flash of at least something.

I now have daft 'party tricks' where someone picks a number between 1 and 45, and I can tell them the name of the corresponding (i.e 36th) US president

Yet I was a cleaner for years, and even cleaning the same houses every week, I couldn't draw any of the floor plans brains are weird!

*People don’t talk to themselves internally

@nosnugglesforyou*

Err......yeah we do, constantly

I see whatever in my head just like I'm watching a movie. Which is frustrating when my movie (while listening to it reading a book) doesn't match the movie someone makes based in the book 🤣🤣

@Dugup If I try and recall yesterday it is in really disconjugated 'blocks' of information. For example, I baked a cake. If I think deeper and try and remember that I think of the feeling of standing in the kitchen mixing the batter with a wooden spoon, bending down to put it into the oven. I get vague bits of visual information with that. For example when I think of putting the cake into the oven my mind can see "Black square blob which is oven", if I try and think of more details of the oven like the timer function I can see "red LED numbers which are timer" but I can't see put together those two aspects into an overall image of black blob + timer = oven.

@BeeFarseer I also have this! Am also a musician and been playing since I was 5. When I was doing music a level and music degree (and practicing for hours) this was at its best. I now play less and am distracted by a family but when I was younger I used to compose whole songs in my head on car journeys. I used to make up the most catchy pop tunes and hooks. The annoying thing was once I got distracted or in another conversation the tune was gone and often I couldn’t recall it again. So frustrating

I can smell, hear & feel (wind on my skin, sand shifting under my feet) the beach but I can’t see it at all.
Same with dreams - I feel everything but don’t see anything.
Face blind too.

My eldest is the same & we’re both bookworms - long descriptive passages get skimmed! I find audio books awful, my mind gets busy & blocks the story out - this can even apply to me reading aloud to the kids

@LovePeonies

I have a constant monologue, but it's not in any way a part of the conscious thought process about functional things.

So for example, I'll be sitting browsing this thread, while visualising inside my head a scene from a book I've read recently, the monologue is busy reciting the lyrics to a song I'm subconsciously listening to inside my head, and the non-monologuing part of my brain is thinking 'hungry, dinner soon'.

The monologue doesn't really ever commentate on whatever is the primary focus at that point, it's usually off talking through something abstract, or replaying past conversations I've had etc. The 'functional' part of my thinking is, like yours, almost instinctive, and doesn't require my monologue to actually 'say it' for my brain to act.

The only time it tends to be unified is if I'm pondering a problem that requires serious concentration, then everything, the monologue, the thing I'm physically looking at, the internal pictures my brain is conjuring up, all of it becomes focused on the issue at hand.

dugup I remember and ‘know’ what I did yesterday, or recent events I might later tell DH or a friend about. Just without any ‘pictures’.

I think I have a poor memory for things further in the past. Eg remember v little of the DCs’ first few years, or anything at all about the content of certain jobs. DH took lots of video and photos, which I love to do, as some memories come back.

DH’s university girlfriend and a friend of ours say they have a ‘photographic memory’ , which I find fascinating. Also remember studying with a friend who was great at ‘cramming’ before exams.

Having read this thread am now also quite confused about the ‘internal monologue’ thing! Mine isn’t at all ‘wordy’.