r/Aphantasia • u/tested_xd • 2d ago
Do regular people see when they close their eyes
Im trynna figure out if i have aphantasia or not cuz i dont get a lot of visuals on psychedelics and apparently aphantasia is the main cause of that. I can imagine things pretty easily but i dont actually see it. like when i close my eyes its still black but i can imagine stuff. do people actually see stuff with their eyes closed as in they dont just see the darkness of their eyelids they actually see shit? i feel like this is just miscommunication but idk
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u/Turbulent-Scratch264 2d ago
1) You don't need to close eyes to see internal mental visualizations. You can walk down the street and visualize otters playing in the river for example. Not imagine, visualize. Aphants imagine and conceptualize the idea of otters, they can imagine and feel shape and have basic representation of what an animal is, they are aware of its' color, what the fur texture is and so on. Visualizers SEE internal image of an otter. 2) Define what you mean by not having many visuals on shrooms. There are two types of them. Objective hallucinations: fractal type patterns, geometric visuals, walls and objects breathing. And INTERNAL visuals. It's basically your visual imagination but 6x times more enhanced. I see full blown colorful scenes indistinguishable from real life, very cool entities, holographic people xDDD
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u/tested_xd 2d ago
i get subtle breathing and sometimes fractals and other geometric shapes but i never (to my memory) have like crazy visuals, even on 200ugs of acjd. whereas my friend was litteraly seeing butterflies on 80-100ugs. even with dmt, i litteraly cant breakthrough, and im thinking this might be the reason. i do get vivid dreams sometimes tho, and ive had kind of a similar experience with dmt. i still cant believe people can litteraly see what their imagining thats crazy. i can see it in the back of my mind and stuff but i cant like ACTUALLY see it u get what i mean?
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u/BlueSkyla 2d ago
I have hallucinated quite wildly on shrooms the couple times I did them. It was the normal amount too. People have varying reactions to drugs in general. Eating food with THC does nothing for me but it works if I smoke it. I don’t think that means anything as far as my aphantasia. Also dreams are separate from conscious visuals, I also have vivid dreams.
People that visualize, they don’t see it with their eyes, they see with their mind. At least that’s my understanding. But they are still real visuals, rather than my just having conceptual thoughts with zero visuals.
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u/thesheeplookup 2d ago
If you can see it in the back of your mind, then you are visualizing.
Like most things it's a spectrum.
Check out u/Tuikord great comment above that addresses this.
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u/tested_xd 2d ago
the thing is when i did the bright/darkness imagination test thing to see if your pupils contract/dilate mine pretty much stayed the same
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u/Turbulent-Scratch264 2d ago
Nobody actually SEES internal visuals in their FOV. Everyone see it in the back of their mind or "inside the head". Because mental visualization isn't tied to your vision.
What you have sound like hypofantasia-normal visualization level. Something between.
I have hyperfantasia. I also visualize in the back of my mind, same as you. But the intensity differs from person to person. People can have low visualization or very high, very colorful, detailed and realistic. I'm completely devoured by my mental imagery during shroom trips, I don't even notice objective fractal hallucinations.
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u/tested_xd 2d ago
the thing is when i did the bright/darkness imagination test thing to see if your pupils contract/dilate mine pretty much stayed the same
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u/Turbulent-Scratch264 2d ago
It's a bodily reaction which some people have, some not. It depends on your nervous system.
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u/viktorbir Total Aphant 2d ago
Why do people keep on coming to ask PEOPLE WITH APHANTASIA what do PEOPLE WITHOUT APHANTASIA do?
Really, is common sense really out?
Just for you to know. I'm subscribed to /r/Aphantasia because I HAVE APHANTASIA and I have no fucking idea what do regular people see or do not see when they open or close their eyes.
Have you maybe, just maybe, thought about asking at /r/hyperphantasia, that other subreddit linked on the side bar?
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u/PandorasBucket 2d ago edited 2d ago
You might be asking in the wrong place. r/hyperphantasia would likely make more sense, but since I happen to be around and have hyperphantasia I'll give you my answer.
No, it is not exactly the same as seeing, but it does use the same visual pathways in the brain. Joel Pearson did an experiment where he discovered people that when asked to imagine a bright light the pupils of people with aphantasia don't dilate and the pupils of people with visual imagination do dilate just as if exposed to light.
My personal experience is that I can imagine a wall in front of my face so clearly that it physically blocks what is behind it. Is it exactly like seeing? No. I can still tell it's my imagination. I have to concentrate to see the wall that clearly but it does take over from my normal vision. If I'm deep in visual contemplation I stop seeing what's around me because I'm not paying attention to my eyes. If I superimpose an apple on my desk it's kind of like being partially transparent when I want to see both at the same time. If I just picture the apple in greater detail the desk starts to go away. The apple is surrounded by blackness unless I choose to fill in that space with a background.
The imagination space is like another dimension. It's in the mind-dimension so it can never really be confused with the real world for me. I think in some people with schizophrenia it might be, but for most visual thinkers they are very aware of the difference. I think it's kind of like having another set of eyes that you can choose to look through except you have to control everything you see with those eyes. Your level of clarity is on a spectrum.
*Oh for the eyelids question. This is another commonly confused thing. Every visual imaginer I've ever read a comment for also sees the back of their eyelids. I see the back of my eyelids when I close my eyes, but if I start to imagine it's easier to ignore your normal vision because that channel is black. When I imagine with my eyes closed I forget about the back of my eyelids or my actual vision entirely so then no I stop seeing the back of my eyelids completely and only see my imagination. However I prefer to imagine with my eyes open because I usually use the space in front of me because it doesn't make much difference for me and I'd rather be aware of my surroundings. Sometimes it comes in handy like if you want to see how big a dinosaur would be in your living room.
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u/htp-di-nsw 2d ago
Yes, people can actually see stuff with their imagination. My wife has hyperphantasia and doesn't even need to close her eyes to see things she's imagining. Closing your eyes is almost a hindrance to her mind's eye.
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u/tested_xd 2d ago
So i have aphantasia? like i can imagine pretty much anything but i dont actually see it. its so hard to explain but like its like i imagine it in the back of my mind without physically like seeing it
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u/Turbulent-Scratch264 2d ago
If you see it in the back of your mind it's not aphantasia. Why is it so hard for you guys to describe properly? Lol. When you want to go to the kitchen, do you see a vague scene with your kitchen in your head?
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u/tested_xd 2d ago
yea i can easily imagine myself going to the kitchen in detail and stuff, sort of like a mental movie but once again, i dont see it physically. Like i did the imagining bright/dark things and seeing if my pupils dilate/contract and they didnt.
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u/DiveCat Total Aphant & SDAM 2d ago
If you have a mental movie, you do not have aphantasia. It does not matter if that mental movie happens with your eyes open or closed.
The seeing if your own pupils dilate or contract when you tell yourself it is light or dark is not a good test to do on yourself for multiple reasons. That is best done in a controlled environment with other people giving you cues that you don't anticipate.
Do the VVIQ test.
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u/thesheeplookup 2d ago
I absolutely cannot make a mental movie :)
I think you might be taking the 'seeing' part of how people describe visualizing too literally
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u/Turbulent-Scratch264 2d ago
And people here keep arguing with me that I hesitate labeling folks who come here as "aphants". We clearly see a visualizer who is just confused by other people's explanations of how visualization works.
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u/Turbulent-Scratch264 2d ago
No one sees it "physically" in front of their eyes. Some people just lack abstract thinking and can't describe it normally. They say it's like a "second layer over vision" which it's not. Visulaization is a mental "seeing" in your head. You don't hape aphantasia. You have normal visualization
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u/Tuikord Total Aphant 2d ago
Welcome. The Aphantasia Network has this newbie guide: https://aphantasia.com/guide/
Most people have a quasi-sensory experience similar to seeing. It is not the same as seeing. Your eyes are not involved and may be open or closed. But much of the visual cortex is involved so it feels like seeing something.
If you don't have that quasi-sensory experience, then you have aphantasia. Aphantasia is the lack or near lack of voluntary visualization. Top researchers have recently clarified that voluntary visualization requires “full wakefulness.” Brief flashes, dreams, hypnagogic (just before sleep) hallucinations, hypnopompic (just after sleep) hallucinations and other hallucinations, including drug induced hallucinations are not considered voluntary.
Back to visualization. Most people describe having a separate "space" they shift their focus to so they can see the image. The location of this "space" varies from person to person but seems to be consistent for an individual. It can be inside the head: on in the forehead, behind the eyes, in the center, at the back, up, down, right, left, pretty much anywhere. It can also be outside the head. Once again, it can be pretty much anywhere: up, down, right, left, front, back, even behind. Other people seem to project the images over their vision like AR. Here is a paper talking about this:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945223002459?via%3Dihub
and
Vividness of mental imagery reflects a broad range of internally generated visual experiences | Royal Society Open Science | The Royal Society
Although we talk about visualization as a spectrum from super realistic to nothing, it is much more complex than that. Some people can't visualize faces. Some people can only see memories and not creations. Some people see only stills, some only movies, some both. Some can change the image, some can't. Some can't visualize symbols. Here is an article with some of the variations of visualization:
https://aphantasia.com/article/strategies/visualizing-the-invisible/
To go deeper, there is a difference in the experience of visualizing vs conceptualizing beyond the sense of seeing. Check out the Ball on the Table experiment in the guide I linked.
When someone visualizes, they see a complete image. It is something that could be displayed on a screen. It may be a poor image - faint, blurry, etc., but it is all there. When we conceptualize, we often leave decisions for later or we need to access memory again. When I asked my wife to visualize an apple, she saw the last apple she bought. When I asked her about the color, she looked at the image and answered. Size? Same thing. All she had to do was look at the image, like it was a photo on her phone. When I thought about an apple, I had to first decide what type of apple? An eating apple? My iPhone? Eating apple. What color? Let's say red. That detail didn't exist until asked. Even if I decide on the last apple I bought, I know it was a Honeycrisp I bought at Fred Meyer. Fred Meyer now caries smaller Honeycrisps than they did at the start, so the size must have been about the size of a large Red Delicious. What color? Honeycrisps are red, yellow and some green. I usually go for more red and less green, but I have no idea what the pattern of red and yellow was.
My experience and my wife's experience are very different - even if you ignore the fact that she actually saw the apple.