Check out Aphantasia. There are many support groups forming. The inability to visualize is a real thing which affects many people to varying degrees. Again, it is real, and many share your experiences. There are people who have lost their ability to visualize through physical trauma, and others who were just born without the ability.

This is an actual cognitive, neurological difference, and we can’t pretend it away. If you are a non visualizer, please join our Aphantasia group on Facebook. You will be glad you did!

“Offensive” is an odd word to use when we’re discussing perception.

You are right the “blackness” is real! I do not see anything, I can only feel things, places, and people intensely. It is a real condition, and I find it offensive that it is not being presented as such.

Unlike MarieFromDenmark I have an excellent memory, no problem remembering anything that happens, but when I close my close my eyes: all I normally see is black.

I agree absolutely with William. If people see stuff when their eyes are closed: then they are the strange ones! That would be pretty much my definition of hallucinating. What other definition can there be? If a kid could do this at a very young age, they’d probably go insane with imagination being more appealing and real than reality!

If I could close my eyes and see images: everything would be so simple. Painting a picture of a landscape or person you saw earlier would be a cinch, studying for exams would be a breeze when you can just dial up a visual diagram in your head, the creative processes would be trivial if I could move and combine images with my mind. How can you fail?

The fact that people don’t ordinarily outclass me in those areas suggests to me that visualization is either a crock or at-least not as described. There is some suggestion that average peoples visualization abilities atrophy in their twenties, but people don’t mysteriously become less good at the skills visualization would help with in their twenties, do they?

In many countries (such as the England) people are not allowed cameras in courtrooms. So newspapers pay expensive artists to attend headline-topical court hearings and paint pictures of the participants later. If visualization were normal, these people would simply remember the participants and paint them easily from memory. But they don’t, they take extensive sketches, and still end up with terrible likenesses.

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That said.. I wrote above that ‘all I normally see is black’… But I have been practicing! If I take a long time breathing and relaxing: I can switch to white! Yup, I can close my eyes and instead of seeing nothing with a black background, I can see nothing with a white background instead!

If I think to myself for long enough, that, since there is no light coming in, I should not be able to see any black, what I should see should be, like a blank sheet of paper! And that’s how I do it. I can hold the white for several minutes. I realize that the logic reasoning used makes no sense, but it convinces something in my mind and it does work (with practice). Remarkable for someone who had never previously had a visualization in my life. There is certainly some sort of ‘logical moderator’ going on…

I have been practicing with other colors and trying to get shapes, but shortly after I get a reasonable amount of non-black in my field of view, something periodic comes along and suddenly disappears it all to black. With lots of practicing, I can now start of see images that are described by hypnotic scripts, but just for very brief moments (a random time, always less than 4 seconds) before they get ‘blacked’.

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I think what what normally happens is that, as soon as normal visualizations start: the logical moderator part of my brain comes along and decides that, in the interests of sanity, It needs to stop this visualization malarkey immediately. I think the reasoning’s that I gave in the first part of this post are so strong in me that they are engrained into the natural processes of my brain. My brain is running what computer people call a ‘watchdog process’ that, in this case, comes up periodically and actively kills and blacks out my visualizations as soon as it notices them and before they can get going: because it is afraid of them.

I would love to turn off the moderator that kills my normal visualization by replacing them with black. My ‘white’ trick is not strong enough to turn off the sanity check, but it does change what the sanity check.. checks. It also demonstrates to my satisfaction that much of the black that I see is not just ‘darkness’, but the perceptual result of an active mental process.

I am guessing that this is what is happening to many of the people who cannot currently visualize. It’s just an overactive defense mechanism.

PLEASE!..
Any scripts to help turn off my moderator (or at least put it in its place) would be VERY much appreciated! Post any ideas in this thread!

Hi Chris,

If I try to recall a certain experience in the past, I can only think about it for one or to secondat before it dissapears again. I dont have troubles focusing about work or what I need to do, But all my thoughts are words. Of course I don’t remember most of my past, it’s like it dissapears after about a year, and only the most significant experiences stays in my memory. But all details are gone.

That is my case too. I have been working at it for since I was 13 & am 50
now. Tried Buddhism that didn’t help