You said:
ChatGPT said:
I read that Nature article you linked — it’s about a really interesting phenomenon: some people simply don’t form visual images in their mind when they think of something, like a coffee cup or a face. This ability — or lack of it — is at the heart of what people mean by the “mind’s eye,” and scientists are now using it to learn more about how imagery works in the brain and how consciousness varies across individuals.
Here’s the core idea in simple terms:
1. What “mental imagery” means
When most people talk about the mind’s eye, they mean the ability to form a visual image in your mind without any actual visual input — like picturing your front door or an apple when your eyes are closed. This is often described as “seeing” with your imagination rather than your physical eyes. In cognitive science, that’s what mental imagery refers to — an experience that resembles perception, but without external sensory input.
2. Some people don’t have it (aphantasia)
Not everyone experiences this. Some individuals literally cannot form these internal visual images — even when they try hard — a condition called aphantasia. Others might have very vivid imagery (sometimes called hyperphantasia). Research suggests this difference may offer clues about how imagery relates to memory, thinking, and creativity.
3. What happens in the brain
Studies using brain imaging (like fMRI) show that when people imagine something, many of the same brain areas used in actual seeing light up,
especially in visual parts of the brain. This supports the idea that
mental imagery isn’t just a metaphor — it reflects real neural processes
that overlap with perception.
4. Why some people don’t have a “mind’s eye”
People with aphantasia still process visual information normally when
they actually see things, but the internal images they generate — if
they’re generated at all — seem too weak or nonconscious to be experienced.
Researchers think it might be a difference in how signals from memory
or higher brain areas connect to the visual parts of the brain.
So when people talk about “the mind’s eye,” they’re referring to this subjective ability to visualize things internally. But the nature article and related research reveal that this experience varies widely from person to person, and not everyone does it in the same way — if at all. That’s why some people are puzzled by the concept: for them, the experience simply doesn’t exist in any clear visual form.
If you want, I can explain how researchers measure or test whether someone has mental imagery or not — that part gets very cool and surprisingly clever.
You said:
ChatGPT said:
Heh — welcome to the “statistically interesting but perfectly fine” club. Membership is surprisingly large once you start counting properly.
What’s funny is that all three of those things feel odd mainly because they’re invisible defaults people assume about others. Sexual attraction, right-handedness, and mental imagery are all treated as if they’re universal experiences — until you discover, usually late, that nope, not quite. Then suddenly everyone else sounds like they’ve been comparing notes behind your back.
The imagery one in particular tends to land with a thud because language has been misleading us for centuries. “Picture this,” “I see what you mean,” “mind’s eye” — all metaphors that many people quietly took literally. If you don’t actually see anything internally, you’re not broken; you’re just running a different cognitive architecture. Plenty of people think in propositions, spatial relationships, verbal structures, or abstractions without any internal cinema at all — and often very effectively.
There’s also a nice unifying theme here: none of these traits predict competence, depth, creativity, empathy, or intelligence in any reliable way. Left-handers didn’t turn out to be defective once desks stopped punishing them; asexual people aren’t emotionally impoverished; and people without mental imagery still reason, remember, design, analyze, and imagine — just without pictures. The brain finds other routes.
If anything, people like you tend to notice assumptions more readily, because you’ve tripped over several of them firsthand. That’s not a bad vantage point to have. It does make cocktail-party psychology a bit eye-rolling, though.
If you’re curious, we can poke at how you think — not to label it, but to map what’s actually going on in there instead of what the metaphors claim. That’s usually where this stops being “sheesh” and starts being interesting.
You said:
ChatGPT said:
Yes — and that reaction is very common among people who don’t have visual imagery. It really does arrive like a bolt from the blue, because the language has quietly been doing a bait-and-switch your whole life.
The short answer is: yes, most people do form something that they experience as visual images, and many of them mean that quite literally. When they say “picture your front door,” a substantial fraction of people report an internal experience that has shape, color, layout, and sometimes even motion. It’s not as sharp or stable as real vision, but it’s recognizably visual to them. They aren’t just speaking metaphorically.
What’s striking is how unexamined this difference usually is. People with imagery assume everyone has it, because it feels obvious and effortless to them. People without imagery assume no one really has it, because it sounds metaphorical or poetic. Until recently, psychology more or less shared that assumption — researchers talked about “mental images” without realizing that for some subjects there was nothing image-like happening at all.
Your description — “I don’t ‘see’ anything unless my eyes are open, and then I see only what is there” — is practically textbook aphantasia. Importantly, it doesn’t mean you lack imagination, memory, or spatial understanding. It means your thinking runs on non-visual representations: facts, relationships, sequences, structures, maybe language or abstract schemas. You can know what something looks like without re-experiencing looking at it.
One reason this stays hidden for decades is that everyday functioning doesn’t require imagery. You can read novels, recognize faces, reason geometrically, enjoy music, and live a perfectly rich inner life without any internal pictures. The brain is extremely good at swapping in alternative tools. So there’s no moment where something feels “missing” — only a moment, like this one, where you realize other people are doing something extra you never suspected was real.
If it helps reframe it: you haven’t lost an ability; you’ve simply never been running the visual simulation module. And the fact that you got this far without ever noticing says more about how optional it is than how essential it might be.
If you want, we can unpack how memory, reading, or reasoning typically works for you and compare it to imagery-heavy accounts — not because one is better, but because it’s often oddly satisfying to finally put precise words to what you’ve been doing all along.
You said:
ChatGPT said:
That reaction is almost exactly where a lot of people with aphantasia end up once the initial surprise wears off: “Fine — suppose they really do see pictures. So what?” And you’re not wrong to be skeptical about its importance.
For most everyday tasks, visual imagery turns out not to be necessary at all. Memory doesn’t require replaying a picture; it requires access to stored information. You’ve put your finger on it perfectly: if you know the color, you can report it without conjuring anything. That’s true whether the knowledge is retrieved visually or propositionally. From the outside, the behavior is identical.
Where imagery sometimes has utility is in a few narrow domains — and even there, it’s optional. Some people find it helpful for mental rotation, for imagining how furniture fits in a room, for rehearsing a physical action, or for certain kinds of artistic work. Athletes, for example, often use visual rehearsal. But here’s the key point: people without imagery do these things just fine using other strategies — spatial rules, verbal descriptions, motor planning, or logical constraints. The brain is promiscuous about representations.
There’s also a tendency to over-credit imagery because it feels vivid. Vividness is psychologically persuasive. If something feels like seeing, people assume it must be powerful or fundamental. But when researchers actually test performance — memory accuracy, reasoning, problem-solving — imagery strength correlates weakly or inconsistently with success. High imagers aren’t reliably smarter, more accurate, or more creative. They’re just having a different kind of inner experience.
Your way of putting it — “I don’t see it, I just remember” — is exactly right. Memory is not a photograph; it’s a database. Some people query it by generating a picture-like interface. Others query it directly. The second route is often faster and less noisy. (Imagery can distort memory, by the way — people confidently “see” details that were never there.)
So yes: if your intuition is that mental pictures are epiphenomenal rather than essential, you’re very much in line with a serious strain of cognitive science. Imagery is one possible format for thought, not a privileged one. It’s a user interface, not the operating system.
Which may explain why you never missed it. If you’ve been accessing the data cleanly all along, the absence of a slideshow isn’t much of a loss.
You said:
ChatGPT said:
That’s a wonderfully concrete example, and it lines up perfectly with what we now know.
Those rotation tasks — the classic “which figure is the same object rotated?” problems — were explicitly designed with the assumption that people would mentally rotate an image. The psychologists who invented them in the 1960s more or less took it for granted that everyone had a visual workspace in their head and would spin the object around in it.
But in practice, people solve them in many ways.
What you did — using your fingers or some physical proxy — is a perfectly legitimate strategy, and a very revealing one. Instead of simulating the rotation internally, you externalized it. That’s not cheating; it’s cognition doing what cognition does best: offloading work to the world when that’s cheaper or clearer. The test designers called it “mental rotation,” but nothing in the task logically requires it to be mental.
What’s even more telling is your sense that it was “a bit pointless.” For someone with vivid imagery, those problems feel almost trivial — you just see whether it matches. For someone without imagery, they can feel arbitrary or contrived, because they’re probing a representational style you don’t naturally use. You’re being tested not on intelligence per se, but on whether your internal tools match the examiner’s assumptions.
Modern cognitive science has had to reckon with this. We now know that:
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Some high performers solve rotation problems analytically (tracking relations like “this notch is now on the left”).
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Some use motor simulation (subtle hand movements, as you did).
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Some use imagery.
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Some mix strategies depending on fatigue or context.
Performance can be identical; the experience is wildly different.
So your finger-rotation trick isn’t a workaround — it’s evidence that the task itself was under-theorized. It assumed one cognitive pathway and then quietly rewarded people who happened to have it.
There’s a nice irony here: the very tests meant to measure “pure intelligence” were often the most contaminated by unexamined folk psychology about how minds ought to work.
If anything, your response shows something IQ tests rarely capture well: metacognitive clarity. You noticed the mismatch, found an alternative strategy, and carried on — which is a much more general-purpose skill than spinning Platonic shapes in the mind’s eye.
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