Aphantasia and Psychedelics
psychedelirium.substack.com47 points by yenniejun111 4 hours ago
47 points by yenniejun111 4 hours ago
My understanding is that most aphantasics (like myself) can still see images while dreaming—suggesting that dreaming uses a different network for visualization. I have vivid dreams most nights.
Shane Williams (an aphant) hosts a podcast where he interviews people using a set of questions designed to probe their inner sensory world. From it I’ve learned, for example, that some people can taste food when reading a menu, or have a conversation with a deceased loved one and actually hear their voice. One of his prompts is whether guests can place themselves inside a photo of a carnival (which he provides); many say they can smell the cotton candy or hear the chatter of the crowd.
It’s striking how little we really know about the variety of inner sensory experiences: Discovering Your Mind – Aphantasia and Beyond https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/discovering-your-mind-...
A favorite research paper compares brain activity in identical twin sisters, only one of whom is aphantasic: The Neural Underpinnings of Aphantasia: A Case Study of Identical Twins https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.23.614521v2
Interesting. I'm somewhere on the aphantasia spectrum, but I very rarely have vivid dreams. Most dreams I would describe it almost like remembering an audiobook instead of a movie.
But I do occasionally have a vivid dream, and though I can't be certain I could swear that I remember more vivid dreams as a child/early adolescent. But by the time I was entering college I rarely remember my dreams and the ones I do remember are like those I described above with little visualization.
It's really interesting to hear about how others perceive these sensory experiences.
Yes, I also see images while dreaming.
I've also once seen super-vivid (far higher fidelity than dreaming) images, while lucid during meditation, and able to "look around", so I don't think we can't (or at least not universally so) - but I've not managed to find a way back to that experience even years later.
I have aphantasia and psychedelics definitely give me visuals. However it‘s more like shifting and warping stuff I and not very pronounced. DMT however is one of the only things that gave me strong visuals, LSD in combination with DXM too so I wonder if it has something to do with the sigma receptor
The visuals you get from psychedelics and the visuals from imagination are different. Psychedelics seem to affect your real visual field. You're not imagining textures melting with colors and walls turning into liquid, it becomes what you see.
I normally have aphantasia, at about 2/5 on one those pop scales that show various versions of an apple. I can sort of rotate geometric shapes without the notion of color or texture.
But rarely, while lying in bed I get these full vivid pictures. It feels like a whole another visual field. I can't really control it, but these are fully detailed like a painting.
It's dizzying how fast I can imagine these when my mind decides to switch into this mode, and how it can switch from one painting to the next fully detailed picture in a fraction of a second. I normally have to strain hard to hold just a few outlines of simple shapes in my mind, evaporating the moment my focus wavers.
I do suspect "visions" can come from different sources as well. I've worked at an ayahuasca retreat center and have drank about 500 times so had some opportunities to investigate this. My vision is typically very "closed" (often it is just a massive intuition increase, it takes me a huge dose to get really into the visionary aspects). I have had visions seemingly from the top of my head (these are the most intense, all encompassing for me), in my "mind's eye"/imagination, in my normal visual field, and from my heart space, and sometimes a mix of all of it. My big suspicion is that DMT induces a type of synesthesia, a mixing of all of the senses, plus intuition, thoughts, and memories, plus a big increase in sensitivity (meaning what we see/feel is not precisely a hallucination).
I'm quite strongly aphantasic, I can, for a split second, hold the essence of a thing in my brain, but it's not even vaguely visual. I have though, several times, experienced almost exactly what you decribe - also while laying in bed trying to get to sleep. Every now and then I can kind of see a room, sometimes the room I'm in, sometimes not, even though my eyes are closed. I love it. I can't switch what I'm seeing though, but possibly because as soon as it happens I'm just laying there marvelling at being able to see something with my eyes shut, and staring intently at the details.
I can also only experience true visualizations when falling asleep or dreaming. I concluded that being awake (correctly?) suppresses vivid visuals and some people when awake simply do not have this (mal?)adaptation.
This matches my experience and I was quite surprised to find out other aphantasiacs have their “minds eye open” when tripping. For me psychedelics only ever produced a fractal overlay on top of what I was already seeing.
I wondered for a long time why everyone else experienced such strong visuals and eventually decided on my own it must be related to aphantasia. It’s nice to find out I might not have been a total crank with that hypothesis :).
Ever tried 2CB or mushrooms/psilocybin and if so, how prominent were the visuals? Always found those to be more visual (for better or worse), particularly compared to LSD, but I don't have aphantasia.
I tried them and probably have apanthasia. Similar experience to the other comments: it's usually just overlaid on what I see. A few time when I closed my eyes and got taken away by music, it would give me a more "story-like" trip, but I don't specifically recall visuals.
I scored as hypophantastic, but I'm not sure if I'm skewing the results because I draw/paint too. So I'm not sure if I'm triggering some detail processing/recall function. I see nothing, but I know what I should be seeing. For a lot of the examples I could... I don't want to call it "visualise" details, but I could describe in detail what should be there, but its in fact blank. Not sure how relevant this is, but I'm also neuro divergent; some diagnosed: ADHD, severe dyslexia, occasionally migraine + auditory hallucinations, undiagnosed but obviously there is also tinnitus. Dunno if I'm also a bit on the spectrum becau I also need to take at least 2x the dose my friends do, and stuff like amphetamines have _zero_ effect on my headspace
Not GP but 2CB and psilocybin were never very visual for me compared with LSD in my tripping days. I have aphantasia and the only chemical to give me full eyes open visuals was DMT. Mescaline was a very distant second.
I have aphantasia but I have visuals when dreaming, and have OEV's on any psychedelic in high enough doses.
So I think it's useful to talk about dosages here.
For example, I won't have OEV's until around 200-250ug of LSD, or 20-22mg 2C-B, or 3.5g mushrooms.
Marijuana gives me the ability to have closed-eye visuals ("mind movies") even in low doses, though I don't use it because it gives me panic attacks.
> has something to do with the sigma receptor
Why? Because two of those drugs are agonists?
> psychedelics definitely give me visuals. However it‘s more like shifting and warping stuff I and not very pronounced.
At least with LSD and psilocybin, that’s what visuals are. You don’t hallucinate things out of thin air on either one of those drugs, things morph and shift and wobble and waver and shimmer and so on.
At least in the dosage ranges I have explored, 7g dried mushrooms and 10 ‘hits’ of LSD which was probably at least 500mcg?
i have aphantasia and extensive experience with psychedelics
for me, as long as my consciousness is still in control, i have no closed-eye visuals akin to what others see. the more i lose control/consciousness, the more visuals i get but only over a certain (high) threshold.
dmt is the only substance that consistently gives me visuals but only at close to breakthrough dosages where i effectively lose consiousness. and they are never "things", they are always the known patterns, ie just raw signals and nothing meaningful - but my mind interprets them in whatever it thinks sensible.
otherwise i hallucinate like i dream or think - in an abstract, non visual way, the only thing i "see" are white flashes in nothingness
I listened to a recent podcast that discussed why giving people with aphantasia the chance to see images is ethically complicated:
https://www.hyperfixedpod.com/listen/hyperfixed/third-eye-bl...
(Presented by Alex Goldman from Reply All)
I have aphantasia, after psychedelic experiences for the next few nights I see small poorly defined things when falling asleep. I don’t enjoy it and the idea of seeing things all the time sounds exhausting. I also have a slight astigmatism and prefer not to wear my glasses because the details of perfect vision are tiring.
I'm not taking the time to listen through that. Is there a transcript?
I haven’t listened to this podcast, but I listened to an excellent RadioLab podcast a while ago on the topic. They ended the podcast by discussing some of the ethics of “fixing” aphantasia, many of which I had never considered.
I recall them mentioning: 1. the ethical challenge of arguing that aphantasia is something that needs “fixed” in the first place 2. The unknowns of what might happen to someone emotionally if they go from nothing to something. This might sound odd, but we know that hyperphantasia can be associated with schizophrenia and other neuropsychiatric issues. 3. The implications of downstream cognitive “enhancements” that might result from this.
I have aphantasia, and I do not think I’d want it “fixed”.
My partner has hyperphantasia, and similarly she wouldn’t want it “fixed”.
An aphantasia "beginner's guide" for those who aren't familiar or just want to learn more: https://aphantasia.com/guide/
I read much of that guide. I was initially led to believe that I have aphantasia. I certainly don't see things that don't exist - that would be an hallucination. I can imagine and describe it in vivid detail if I want, but it's not there - I don't see it in the same way I see the physical reflection of light on surfaces.
Similarly I don't hear sounds that are not produced by difference in air pressure hitting my ear drums. Again, that would be an hallucination. But I can certainly imagine sounds, again in great detail, including musical melodies and different instrument timbres.
Then, I get to the part about dreaming. I don't dream often, which also seems like a sign that I have it. That said, on some of my dreams, all sensations feel very real. Images, sounds, conversations, faces, colours, emotions... Those are hallucinations for all practical purposes though.
Except the fact that I have those vivid dreams seems to say I don't have aphantasia.
Not that it will make a lot of difference in my life, but where does that leave me? :D
I feel in my gut that this is fad-driven internet bullshit, and I would like to learn less, if it were possible.
> Dr. Adam Zeman, a neurologist from Exeter, receives a patient who can no longer imagine — known as patient MX. MX goes blind in his mind’s eye after undergoing surgery.
> Media outlets like the New York Times report the findings. This leads to an outpouring of new discoverers.
Hmm
My gut feel has always been that it is just a language thing where some people think that when others imagine things that they literally see it right in front of them _the same way_ they see real things.
Like, when I imagine a scene or object in my head, I am not literally seeing it. It's like some vague in-between thing. And that people who claim to have aphantasia just have a higher bar for what it means to "see" something.
Though I'm open to being corrected if there's some concrete experiment that can be performed that shows definitively that some people can not imagine things _at all_.
I have aphantasia. I do not normally see things in my inner eye at all, but I still "imagine" things. I can draw things I imagine, even though I can't see them.
But I do see images while dreaming. It's very distinct from imagining things while awake and unable to see them.
And I have had one waking experience where I saw images as clearly as if I was looking at a photograph while awake, in a dark room, with my eyes closed during meditation. It was very different from when I'm dreaming.
This is not a "language thing". Until the experience mentioned above, I had gone ~40 years with no idea seeing things in your minds eye while awake was a thing at all.
Maybe you have aphantasia as well. I had without knowing it.
Some observations:
Someone told me to close my eyes and think about "an apple at a table".
Then I was told to open my eyes and tell what color the apple was.
The question didn't make sense to me:
I only thought about about the concept of "an apple on a table". When my eyes are closed it is black. Absolutely black. Blacker than a Norwegian winter night with cloud cover and no moon. There is nothing.
Until then I thought all this talk about seing things was just a metaphor for what I had also done.
But when I talk to others they will often immediately say it was green or red. Because they saw it.
Two extra observations:
Sometimes just before I fall asleep I can sometimes think images of stuff that doesn't exist: think 3d modeling with simple shapes.
And just after waking up I can sometimes manage to see relatively detailed images of actual physical things.
Both these only last for a few seconds to a few minutes.
Does this help?
It's hard to describe. I think there's more nuance here. When you ask "What colour was the apple?" then I can "fill in" the colour and imagine a "red" one. But it's more like the details are filled in "on demand" or "lazilly" rather than "ahead of time". And like I said, it's not the same thing as actual visual hallucination.
It is helpful to have someone engage, for sure. I have a question for you: if you look at a 3d object that you can only see one side of, can you make inferences about the other side of the object? Can you rotate it in your head? Could you quickly be able to tell whether an object will fit in a particular hole, without actually trying it?
I also have this mostly when I'm half asleep and have had some very 4K sharp lucid dreams as well, including seeing leaves on a tree up close and feeling the texture.
Under normal circumstances, my imagination is also colorless and is more about spatial layout and shapes. Like an untextured 3D model.
Are you trying to help them believe?
Yes. Or maybe rather understand. For me it was a lightbulb moment just like my realisation of exactly how bad my colourblindness was: what is next to impossible for me to see (red drawings on woods in maps) was chosen by someone who thought it stood out.
I'm at least pointing out that I now know personally that there are multiple levels of visualisation, from me just "feeling" what it would mean to rotate a 3d object (it works, I can absolutely determine if it will fit but it is absolutely not visual) up to some close friends of mine that see vivid pictures of faces and can combine them with eyes closed.
For me who cannot see images except what I physically see it certainly is interesting to hear people describe remembering peoples phone numbers as text that they can see (I remember the feeling of myself saying it, not the sound) or memorising my name by mentally putting the image of ne next to their image of their brother who has the same name as me (!)
It really is funny, because I can draw. For example the famous "draw a bike" thing seems weird to me because I can't see myself making any of the mistakes from any of the drawings. Not because I can see a bike, but because I know it.
I really wish I could occupy your brain for a few minutes to see just how much of this is language. There's an amazing effect in this conversation where I remain convinced that basically everything I've heard could come down to definitional differences, and yet it really could come down to a radically different subjective experience between us, and I have no real way of knowing.
Being able to draw better than people who can "visualize" better throws doubt on what type of thing "visualizing" really is.
My gut feel is that people's experiences can be quite different. V.S. Ramachandran's books have nudged me to take these things more seriously.
I think visual imagination is also related to spatial rotation abilities. For example can you imagine yourself in your hometown, then imagine an "animation" as you (from a first-person perspective) fly up vertically, then turn in various directions and sort of feel where the landmarks are in the mind's eye? Or does that sound nonsense to you? Would you agree that being faster at certain tasks (that require a visual scratchpad - e.g. imagining a tabletop and being told what happens e.g. add a triangle on the left, add a square halfway overlapping the triangle etc) indicates that someone has more vivid imagination?
Patient MX there is quite persuasive. Lots of neuroscience discoveries start with somebody having some brain damage and losing a facility of some kind. However, most of the people claiming aphantasia, or the extreme opposite, are not brain damaged. At least not literally.
It would also be more valuable information if some area was damaged that was known to cause the effect.
The parent article has brain scans showing different activations in control brains vs aphantasia vs hyperphantasia. Also when people self report that their experience has qualitatively changed that seems like a pretty strong indicator that’s at least a range.
The fact that some people report aphantasia and some people don't implies that their brains are different but it does not imply that the reason the brains are different is aphantasia. For example, aphantasia has some comorbidity with autism, probably because autism leads people to interpret expressions in different ways.
So you’re saying you think people who report aphantasia see mental imagery but don’t think of it as imagery? And that the brain scans indicate difference but not around mental imagery?
Yeah essentially, or alternatively neither group has visual imagery. I think it fundamentally comes down to phenomenology being very hard to express in language.
That’s why the self reports seem valuable to me. If someone says “I’ve never seen something in my minds eye” and then they do dmt and say “oh shit I can see things in my minds eye now I totally get what people mean now” it seems to imply there’s a spectrum of visualization capabilities. There’s also people who’ve gone in the opposite direction due to injury.
But people who do dmt are also liable to say "oh shit I can see the machine elves, I totally get what people mean now". Which is not to say that their reports are unreliable, just inscrutable.
I also lost the ability to think in images after a series of surgeries at 13. I went from being a very imaginative kid with dream like states while awake to purely lexical. I stopped enjoying playing pretend with my sister basically overnight, I just couldn't see it any more.
I still do have visual dreams though they are rare, I can no longer conjure any sense of an object while awake. I have a couple images from before this (my mother's face before she died) that I can kind of almost see, idk, or I have the feeling like I'm seeing them.
Call it whatever you like, maybe there is a natural distribution, I always thought of it as the cost I paid to stay alive, my own personal brain damage even though my surgeries were all cardiovascular.
I respect you, fellowniusmonk, but all we ever get about aphantasia is self-report, anecdote, self-assessment questionnaire, subjective impression. People want me to be nice about this and acknowledge that the thing exists because they all say it does. The best I can offer is acknowledgement that you all say it does.
On the other hand, you have a special claim to plausibility because of the surgery. Oh wait cardiovascular surgery? So, are we saying anaesthetic side effects? Or brain damage from reduced blood flow maybe.
I'll note that a lot of people's impressions and feelings about ... what it's like to be alive, generally ... undergo a radical transformation at about age 13, because hormones.
As someone with aphantasia, all I ever get from people who can visualize is self-report, anecdote, self-assessment, etc.
By definition, this will always be the case until we have a deep enough understanding of the brain to diagnostically assess this.
What I can assure you is that I cannot see/imagine with my mind, and that many other aspects of my life make sense given this limitation, e.g. when people describe their experience of reading books and mental world building, it’s entirely foreign to me. Or when my brother describes his ability to create mind palaces, manipulate visual concepts mentally as if he were using CAD software, etc. it seems preposterous.
But I have to take his word that it’s something he can actually do. Such is the nature of this subject.
Until I discovered the concept of aphantasia in my early 30s, I genuinely thought that people’s descriptions of “visualization” were just a figure of speech. It was mind blowing to learn that people actually see anything more than nothing at all, and a lifetime of experiences and confusion about what other people described about theirs suddenly made sense.
If your core issue is with trying to quantify and observe others Qualia I think you're going to have a hard time.
I still have people tell me I must be faking my colorblindness, or just treat me like I'm blind. Normally teenagers, theory of mind is tough at that age.
I'm not sure nice or just a smidge of humility/uncertainty in expressing doubt.
Propagation of information pre-internet was so low people just couldn't easily triangulation on some of these things.
Fwiw I generally agree with you, my wife brought this up to me just in the last few years and I was like, oh I just thought this happened to everyone around 13 like a reverse Hook (the movie) thing.
But I can't paint or draw worth a damn sense then and she can freehand paint hyper realistic pictures. I don't see how she could do that without the imagination version of a stencil.
After I found out it wasn't a normal part of puberty I just figured it was brain damage acquired during the surgeries.
Also, from what I understand fMRI shows enough of a difference I'm inclined to believe the other people who say they were born that way.
Well, I'm an artist, but I don't insist that I can visualise things vividly, whatever that really means.
I'm looking at the brain scans in the article now. It's good that it's got 'em. Do they really mean what they're presented as meaning? It shows that some people, when told to imagine things, activate a bunch of brain regions. Some of those are also involved in actual looking, though not with clear purposes. Then there's also areas to do with memory and salience. I'll say that the people in this group are having a more emotional experience when they imagine. They give more of a shit, they pay more attention. I'm not sure that this qualifies as a skill, or an ability, or "seeing". But heck, what's seeing anyway?
>all we ever get about aphantasia is self-report, anecdote, self-assessment questionnaire, subjective impression.
Is there any other way to get information on what people see internally?
The idea that great artists, for example, don't have dramatically different visualization than people who report not seeing sharp images or images at all seems like the theory in need of proof.
You can't just say the evidence is subjective so you're right. The evidence only ever could be subjective.
Did I say I'm right? I assume we're all wrong in ways yet to be discovered, that's my default position on everything. And I've modified my viewpoint slightly just now: I accept that there are loose groups of people who experience imagination differently. So I'm being decently open-minded here, what do you want, blood?
What are you trying to imply with the “hmm”?
I personally found out about my aphantasia when reading an article in Scientific American titled “When the Mind’s Eye is Blind”. A whole lifetime of experiences clicked into place.
So it’s not surprising that there would be an outpouring of new discoveries after more people learn of the concept.
Learning about aphantasia is how I learned people experience anything other than nothing visually in their mind’s eye.
Aphantasia makes a number of testable hypotheses and can/has/continues to be dealt with as a serious scientific question. But instead of taking the time to do even the bare minimum of research, you trust your gut to tell you that it's bullshit. Classy.
You didn't really say anything here yourself other than that you're awed by it. Also that I'm the one who has to do all the work apparently.
If you're gonna come out and say "trust my gut, this is bullshit" - yes, you do need to do all the work.
Why's that, then?
I'm digging around in the Wikipedia article on "burden of proof", quick, head me off at the pass before I quote it.
Heh, it mentions "burden tennis". It all devolves to who's got the status quo on their side and who's making the extraordinary claim, or not. I can see why fistfights are a popular way to resolve disagreements.
Google scholar has 5000+ hits on the term, I'd suggest starting there. Once you've completely your meta-analysis proving that it's all "bullshit", let us know. That's how science works. You think your 10 minutes scrolling wikipedia substitutes for decades of research? Surely, since you and your gut feel so strongly about it, the evidence should speak for itself.
It's not decades of research, the term was coined in 2015. There's a vague reference to something similar earlier but it doesn't constitute pre-existing research. It's an extremely recent phenomenon to research it.
Curious - do people see a picture perfect apple when they close their eyes?
If you ask me to imagine a red apple, i can, but i have the image somewhere other than my actual vision... If i close my eyes I can't manipulate that space to show the apple.
There is a very huge spectrum of answers for this, ranging from complete inability to picture literally anything to being able to visualize it with greater clarity than their actual eye-balls.
I have aphantasia and have been practicing meditation with the goal of improving the condition for a couple years. I have seen some minor improvements - when I'm in a pretty relaxed state I can see some visuals, but am not able to control the stream of images.
I haven't been working on this quite as much recently since there seems to be a connection with the meditation causing an ocular migraine with aura.
The more I read about aphantasia, the more I'm convinced half the people who claim to have it are simply of the anxious persuasion. The language used to describe imagination, or the perceived lack thereof, is pretty conducive to fostering doubt and confusion.
I wonder if schizophrenia is not partially disregulated phantasia. Or at least one of the symptoms.
On the graph for aphantasia where it's words. I certainly dont imagine words. If I were to stretch the truth about seeing an apple, I maybe see an outline. Certainly no detail inside, like the relfection of light off the apple.
Psychedelics, like mushrooms, do nothing for me. Mushrooms, I've never had a high better than say a light buzz from alcohol, generally nothing. I never get the wavvy or beer goggles from alcohol. I could be absolutely smashed, drink a micky in a couple hours and still pass a field sobriety test; and im a cheap drunk. THC doesnt do much of anything. Opiates take alot; any amount of morphine and nothing. Still feel the pain. One time I had Dilaudid. That helped with the surgical pain maybe 50%; from intolerable to tolerable. Nothing though, no hallucinations or anything. Maybe at some peak I was feeling a wierd flush or wave feeling in my body but nothing significant.
I interpreted it as more of "concepts" and not the word floating in space. That's closer to how I would describe my experience. With effort I can kinda force a static visualization but for lack of a better explanation it feels almost like a wireframe pre-render. Sounds similar to how you describe it.
Dreaming feel reminiscent to what an Audiobook feels like when thinking about the dream after waking up.
I feel like there's more to aphantasia than just "can you see the apple or not?". I can't for the life of me imagine an apple. At best, I get a very faint and dark picture of something resembling the fruit. Plus, there's one on the desk right next to me, so I shouldn't have too much trouble with the assignment, but here we are.
On the other hand, I have a pretty good memory (compared to my peers) and I can recall vivid (at least to me) images of the past. For example, I can still picture a scene of me and my dad picking apples in my grandparents' garden years ago, just after my grandmother passed away. I recall the cold November weather, the grey sky, the felled apples laying on the ground, some rotten. I can still remember what I was wearing that day. Similarly, I do dream a lot, most often accompanied with clear images of places and people, fictional or not. Even though I am utterly incapable of drawing these memories and dreams (I tried), I would still qualify these things as "image", and I can't fathom them being any clearer.
Am I just misunderstanding the exercise or is there something here?
I think I have a similar experience. I can remember scenes to some degree and my dreams are extremely vivid. I wish I could `see` in my mind like I do when I dream. But I don't think I can imagine an image very well. I certainly can't close my eyes and `see` it and I find it hard to believe that others can.
> I feel like there's more to aphantasia than just "can you see the apple or not?".
There is. I think the definition is still being worked on. Here is an overview, but I don't see your particular case: https://aphantasia.com/article/science/aphantasia-definition...
Since you can recall scenes you saw, it might not be Aphantasia. Not being able to create visuals of random stuff might be called differently.
There is a simple (unofficial?) test for aphantasia, and I have tried it on many of my peers, it seems to be accurate.
_Close your eyes and ask someone else to read the instructions for you. If you really want to take it stop reading here._
.
.
.
Imagine a room with a table in it. Someone comes in, puts a ball on the table and the ball falls down from the table.
- What age was the person that came in?
- What hairstyle did they have?
- What was that person wearing?
- How big was the table? Describe how it looked like.
- What color was the ball?
... and similar questions.
In my experience, people with aphantasia will say "I don't know" or "I didn't pay attention" to almost all of these questions. For me personally, everything is "blank." There was no ball to see there, and the person did not have a face. I just experience "feelings" or "sensations" of the scenario, like in the matrix movie. At most some wire frames. Most other people would say, for example, there was a big brown table with metallic legs in the middle of the room, and the person that came in had a blue T-shirt.
> Most other people would say, for example, there was a big brown table with metallic legs in the middle of the room, and the person that came in had a blue T-shirt.
I would only take that seriously from thoughful, detail-oriented, intelligent people who have demonstrated critical introspection abilities before. Otherwise I'd assume they are making it up post-hoc. People often swear up and down in witness testimonies about what they saw and it just turns out to be complete post-hoc fabrication of their mind, even if it seems true to them. Similarly I think they post-hoc think it was a big brown table but this is like a language model completing the sentence.
It's been shown how in split brain patients the language center of the brain can make up totally unsupported justifications for actions that "explain" its experience, fully unrelated to what actually happened.
I'm not sure that these types of questions necessarily capture the different levels of what people might "see," though. I couldn't tell you the age or even face of the person I imagined, but I can say with confidence that they were male; I also didn't imagine the table in much fidelity, but I very clearly pictured the person approaching the table from my right side (his left side) and that when the ball fell, it rolled towards me.
I can give you a quick and infallible test, but it has to be done live. How do I reach out?
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