Any other aphantasic observers out there?

Nature Talk
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I only learned about 5 years ago what aphantasia is and that I indeed was someone who had it.

Most people when you ask them to ‘picture’ something with their eyes closed can actually see something. Aphantasics – can’t. It’s always just black. (Most have no trouble dreaming though.)

This a discovery for me came after a long career in commercial art and design.

I used to think when someone asked, say a group I was in to ‘shut your eyes and imagine you’re on a beach’ that everyone else knew you couldn’t really do that. Until I discovered that they actually could!

Anyhow, when it comes to nature observing, I wondered if there were others who have this condition and how does it affect their observing.

In my case, I seem to have a strong ability to find things that are new, even if I can’t ‘see’ similar species I’ve already observed in my mind. I was like that in my job too. We would work with photo catalogues of 80,000 shots or so, and I could remember (but not picture) them quite well in my mind.

Some recent studies (it’s a very new field) have indicated that aphantasics indeed do store images like everyone else, it’s just those images are not visually accessible. It’s a kind of wall that blocks the normal ‘mind’s eye’ from connecting them to the conscious mind.

Anyhow, I thought it might be interesting to hear from other aphantasics out there about their observing experiences.

Estimates are pretty fuzzy, but mostly somewhere between 7-10% of the population have this condition.

Do you? How does it affect your observing?

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Not aphantasic but I am curious…

…what does “remembering” a photo shot consist of with aphantasia? I can only imagine remembering one as an image in my mind, so I’m curious what other information you were remembering about them instead?

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I don’t have it, but I am fascinated by the question and I hope others will chime in with their experiences!

I do have mild face-blindness, but it seems specific to viewing humans (I can’t pull up a mental image of a person’s features, even close family members. I do usually recognize people I know when I see them, although I can get thrown off if I see someone out of their usual context, or if they unexpectedly change their hairstyle.) Funnily enough, I could easily picture and describe the faces of every one of my neighbors’ pet chickens, but if a sketch artist asked me to describe my own mother to them, I doubt I could give anything useful!

Do you recognize you’re seeing something new when you first spot it, or is it more that you realize you’ve found a lot of new things after the fact when you go to look them up?

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I did not know about aphantasia until today. I think I might be aphantasic.

I also tend to spot the novel (to me) and unique in nature more so then my peers.

I usually recognize I am seeing something I have never seen before the first time I spot it. Rarely I confuse the new for something I have seen or don’t immediately recognize something I have seen before.
Even after keeping track of species with inat and being at ~2,700 recorded I still am able to. Even without knowing names for the plants, they seem to be stored in my heads in some strange format.
It is as if my brain gets an itch and the new thing gets highlighted and my eyes are drawn to it, it’s mostly subconscious. It almost seems to be recognized as something new before I have fully seen it and aware of what I am looking at.
I assume my brain picks up on tiny details really fast and determines it is novel before I even realize it.

That being said, I don’t think the two are related.
I did wonder if my ability to see more shades of green than the average person was part of the reason I spot plants my peers do not.
But I usually just attribute it to my pattern recognition boosted by my nuerodiversity.

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I ID Unknowns for ‘today’ and wonder why other people don’t notice - 3 duplicates in a row. Perhaps this explains it sometimes ?

I dream in words - if I ‘see a picture’ I wake up with nightmares!

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I wish I knew. Most of the time, it’s a pure gut thing. I just remember, but I don’t know how to image-in it. The phrase, “I know it when I see it” is about as useful as “Beats me”, but that’s all I get when I try to figure out how it works.

It’s more of a holistic impression, but the more I focus on finding an image, the more words associated with its description will emerge. It’s much the same with my nature observations. I don’t even know the right terms for a lot of the the parts involved in the identifying details, but I somehow know what and where they are. Most of the time. And as I slowly gain some skills and knowledge, I gain enough confidence to trust this sense. Most of the time. Still lots of ways to trip.

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You’ve described pretty much just what I go through in being able to find new stuff. I’ve also become very much more aware of many distinguishing secondary clues and in the case of wee tiny bugs and such, that’s often behavioral movements, environmental differences, responses. Small, beyond naked eye differences that help me pull, say, a new species of midge from a swarm on a wall.

I sometimes internally refer to it as my :Monty Python’ sense, as in, “and now for something completely different”.

I’m afraid the Where’s Waldo books didn’t have much to offer me as a kid.

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I have played with lucid dreaming techniques – those that rely less on visual recall instruction, and I discovered that when I have (on rare occasion) managed to be mentally awake at the threshold of REM activity, that often it begins with text imagery.

Which then becomes a challenge because, as someone who has worked so much with typography my mind becomes instantly focused on the details of form and expression. It’s just so much FUN to be able to think AND see!

Most of my success at achieving lucidity are so brief because it becomes too exciting too quickly to maintain as a dream, for me. But when I do remember to control that excitement, I experience what I would describe as profoundly real visions and other sensory experiences (touch, smells) that upon waking makes my woken sensory ‘reality’ profoundly dull and lifeless. More dreamlike than the dream!

But it has made me more aware of just how thick and complex the set of mental filters becomes as we ‘mature’.

And, I suppose, just how much more wonder-full the imagination is with the very young who have yet to develop these muting but sadly necessary controls.

Also makes me think that most living, wild things operate in states much closer to this heightened awareness, mostly because there simply isn’t room for anything else.

It’s almost the antithesis of the observing mission. What if we DIDN’T put a name to things, and just experienced them RAW?

Then you have the same open sensory experiences of a young child who can easily become obsessed with the most ‘mundane’ and commonly available natural sources – a leaf, a wandering ant, a spider.

The power of the natural world to open us up to that sense of infinite wonder is all around us. But only truly accessible when you shut off our day-to-day filters.

Trippy stuff – quite literally. I’m thinking now of Aldous Huxley’s description of his controlled mescaline trip and getting lost in the wonder and incredible sense of connection of a simple flower (a geranium, perhaps?) that was on the table in front of him.

In some ways, nature observing (without the performance enhancing aid of drugs) does bring me closer to that experience.

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Took a test to check this out, I knew I don’t visualize like my friends.
My hypophantasic experience places me on the visual imagination spectrum:

Aphantasia ↔ Hypophantasia ↔ Phantasia ↔ Hyperphantasia

Each point on this spectrum represents a unique way of experiencing the world. By understanding our differences, we gain insights into the diversity of human cognition.

So… most of my mental imagery is flat, lacking detail. Don’t know how to explain it, I feel I think in ideas, not exactly words or images.
I can do ‘directed dreaming’, guiding my mind into a lucid dream-state. It was how I controlled (detached from) physical pain as a child.
How does it affect how I see? Don’t know as it’s all normal for me. I see more color shades than some, came in handy when I had a painting company. I worked as a veterinary assistant, I could recognize patients (the pets) even when I’d see them out for a walk, but not recognize the clients (owners) anywhere but the office.
Dreams are ideas, if I see them, it’s dim and quick rarely retained.
I know if something is new to me, and I think I just let things show themselves to me while I’m out iNatting.
Long answer! I’m partially aphantasic. Sometimes I can dimly “see” what I think.

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As a first year science student we talked about not losing our sense of wonder. I kept the wonder, lost the science - but iNat is a good compromise.
Inspired then by one of Henri Rousseau’s paintings of ‘jungle’. And I can still see that book with its picture on the cover (not the dustcover - it was a beautiful book)

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Interesting.
I just looked for a test too

Screenshot 2025-02-24 at 11.21.50
Screenshot 2025-02-24 at 11.21.501982×1452 307 KB

This is from here
Also this one worth checking out if you want to test yourself around this :
https://aphantasia.com/article/strategies/ball-on-the-table/

I’m maybe more aphantasic than I realised.

There is a correlation with autism too I see…

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That resonates with me. As a child, and even as a teen, I was driven to understand more about the natural world. A science geek to the max.

It was only near the end of high school when my totally supportive science teachers went out of their way to encourage me to continue my studies in that direction by entering me in academic contests, taking me to university lectures, etc, did I start to question my science obsession.

And it was at these university lectures where I started to realize that perhaps the world of science wasn’t a good fit for me. Mostly, it was seeing how a science career seemed to necessitate focusing on increasingly narrow interests, fields , and sub-fields.

My teenage mind was scared away by this revelation enough that I sought refuge in rather menial labour work for 4 years before deciding to give commercial art a go. Now, 40+ years later, I’m rediscovering my science connections through iNat.

Also, a younger brother who’s a research scientist as well as a nephew who is a microbiologist. Whenever we get together in full geek mode, it’s a real treat. They are most accommodating for working around the gaps that have evolved since we split paths.

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Ditto. In fact, I often dream in text, to the extent that I often recognize the layout or the typeface and ‘know’ that I am reading the NYT, for example.

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https://brainhealthassessment.com
I took this test. I have heard of this doctor from other sources and have listened to his interviews on podcasts.

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I also have face blindness (prosopagnosia), but not aphantasia (even with faces). I can picture faces in my mind just like anything else, but my brain doesn’t detect them as “special,” or have the ability to identify them beyond the level of basic object recognition.
I can typically learn to recognize people I see often, but primarily by their overall appearance rather than their face specifically

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I have read that “thinking in pictures” is considered an autistic trait; but when I have asked non-autistic people what it means to “think in words,” I do not get an understandable explanation. When I have tried to comprehend this, all I get is an image of words on a page, as some others in this thread have described.

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I am not aphantasic but almost. What I can imagine is usually very poor and distorted.

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I think in both pictures and words (and have Asperger’s). When I think of something, I imagine both the word for it and the image of it. I think typically the word comes first. I had never considered that this wasn’t how it worked for everyone until hearing about aphantasia

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I’m confused… there is no aphantasia test here (?)
just a test which leads to a short vague video on youtube about brain type…

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Woah, I have face blindness of basically exactly the same type it would seem, though I have a bit more of an issue recognizing people than you seem to. I’ve never really heard anyone else talk about it before.

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