Thorn already answered that question.
What I want to know is, is there anybody that can conjure up a smell with their mind?
Comments suggested I may be all alone here with my aphantasia, though some of us are on the low end of the visualizing spectrum. Yes, though, I would guess I'm better than average and quite likely better than most at keeping/manipulating/analyzing sounds in my head. I don't have perfect pitch but good relative pitch, and my job (transcription) requires being able to hang onto spoken words in my mind until my transcribing catches up, and that certainly is more natural for me than for any other transcriptionists I know.
1: Sure, imagining a smell is easy for me. Is that not normal?
As a synaesthete I can not merely hear melodies in my head but see them as well. However, I can't sing them in the real world as I've been unable to hold a tune since my voice broke.
3: So, you can imagine a disgusting smell, and disgust yourself?
I had never heard of aphantasia until reading the term here. Having now done the test on the BBC site, moderately low, but not unusually so (according to that).
re: sound, though, I have reasonably OK pitch when playing an instrument. I can bend a note on a guitar and be pretty sure of being within a few cents of the pitch I am aiming for. I am very sensitive to guitars being out of tune, to the extent that I find a lot of guitar instructional videos on youtube annoying because the G or B string on the guitar isn't in tune.
But ... when I've done pitch recognition tests, or done ear training (I have an app on my phone I've been using) my scores aren't actually that great. So, I guess average for both auditory imagery and for visual.
Depends on the music. Usually abstract colour patterns, sometimes incorporating instruments, sometimes musical notation, but not always. Invariably one colour against a black background.
In terms of conjuring it up, though, I can sing substantial sections of (a very small number of) jazz solos in my head, from memory.
There's Smetana's sad description of his tinnitus as the "shrill whistle of a first inversion chord of A-flat in the highest register of the piccolo" - able to describe it exactly, but not to make it stop.
I have some tinnitus, but fortunately I can't describe it. I think that helps me never notice it until somebody calls attention to it.
It's much more likely to have been from the noise of tightening the bolts on a grain bin.
12: RT, you and I both know that's not possible.
11: I also have it, to the point where I can't hear mechanical whining noises since they blend with the tinnitus. Mostly I ignore it. Every so often it bugs me, but I've mostly adjusted. No danger that it came from rocking too hard. It's just genetic in my case.
I have tinnitus too. I've not actually told anyone that in real life. Usually I don't notice it unless I think about it, but occasionally the house will be quiet and I'll be more aware of it. I'm a bit worried it'll get worse as I get older. Not from rocking too hard either, I'm usually the one turning the volume down.
I'm pretty sure I can imagine smells. I'm rubbish at tunes though. And accents.
Tinnitus is one of my big fears.
In grad school I had a brief ear infection that left me with something that was tentatively diagnosed as a mild instance of Meniere's disease - occasional episodes of tinnitus, balance problems and such. It's only made me throw up a couple of times, and most of the time it's undetectable except for visual symptoms; after the infection and ever since, I see weird shimmering moire patterns when I look at grids - fences, screen doors, that kind of thing.
For the first couple of months I was scared that it was going to give me permanent reading difficulty. (lurid will remember me studying for my Ph.D. orals while wearing different kinds of colored sunglasses.) Then the plastic brain sorted itself out, and now the only lasting consequence is that I have an unusual experience of bar codes.
I had a lot of tinnitus as a teenager and in my early 20s. But that was from rocking hard. Couple of really loud gigs a week, every week, plus playing in and rehearsing with bands. Thankfully, I don't seem to have it now.
I am very sensitive, though, to the noises made by switch mode power supplies. I can always hear the mosquito like whine of laptop PSUs and the like, and it drives me nuts. It's like tinnitus only externally generated.
weird shimmering moire patterns when I look at grids - fences, screen doors
One of my more irritating symptoms is an intolerance for strong visual patterns. Walking past a slatted fence makes me feel like I'm about to pass out.
I have lots of tinnitus but I don't really care about it. Heebie, if you need help thinking of scarier things to be afraid of, let me know.
20.1: What about driving past a cornfield in August?
August is okay, but September is asking for trouble.
22: Because the leaves are gone and the rows are more clear?
23: What if, instead of hearing an imaginary ringing tone, you heard small children squabbling ALL THE TIME EVEN WHEN THEY WERE ASLEEP!? Oooooooo.
Or what if you stopped being able to feel the texture of fabric, so everything you touched felt like skin touching your skin, EVEN YOUR CLOTHES.
I feel like you aren't taking corn seriously enough.
I constantly, and I mean every waking moment, have a song in my head. Relatively high fidelity (i.e. not just a melody).
And that song is "For Those About To Rock."
I've got that song where the refrain is "and the gun still rattles" running through my head. But I don't know the lyrics, so I hear the voice of the singer kind of humming it.
re: 30
I think if you were walking about embodying true metal, the soundtrack would be either of these, and you'd develop a distinctive walk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3hsCiGS9Uc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xFc86tzFG4
5: I can certainly imagine a disgusting smell, like rotting garbage or farts. It's not going to make me overwhelmed with disgust, but it's unpleasant. The only reason to do so is to check that I actually can do so, in response to questions like 1.
What about a nicer smell, like an orange or a fresh bag of Swedish Fish?
35: Sorry about that, but it was necessary for science.
So, again, is it actually unusual to be able to imagine smells? Can't most folks do that?
My guess is that most people can do it, because it's common to read passages of fiction and journalism in which smells are described, which would be of little value if most readers couldn't imagine smells.
I don't know if I can imagine smells or just remember them.
38.1: I know that I can't.
38.2: Yes, that's interesting. A description of a smell can be evocative, but I don't feel like I'm smelling anything.
Scent is definitely the sense I'm least able to conjure up mentally, to the extent I'm not sure I can do it at all. I wonder to what extent this is because it's something I've never really tried to do.
In contrast, I can easily summon mental images and sounds. I can replay familiar songs in my mind's ear and can focus on specific things such as the timbre of the bass guitar, and I can picture the all the rooms in my grandparents' house, which I haven't been in since it was sold twenty years ago.
I think I can imagine sounds the same way I can images. I have a sense of hearing the sound, but I don't have the same experience I would if I were hearing actual external sound. Smells the same, but much less clearly than sound or vision.
39. What is the distinction? When I conjure up music, or something I've seen, or a smell, it's usually (always?) a memory of an experience; perhaps it's been sanded down a bit (like converting a vinyl record into an MP3) but it's still real.
11. I have some tinnitus too, but I mostly notice it only when my surroundings are really, really quiet. If I pay attention to it, I can hear it almost at any time.
20. The cornfield thing is real and a fair number of people have it (not me, luckily). It can cause epileptic seizures. When I was driving along a long road in France with lots of very evenly planted ("German forests") trees and a low sun, I could see the point. It was just below the level of actually affecting me.
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I'm developing a pet peeve about "gaslighting". I think it's being misused a lot lately.
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On the contrary, I think recent usage has been exemplary.
Huh. I don't feel like I can imagine smells at all, at least not like I can "see" or "hear" things I imagine. I don't know that I can do feel or taste either.
I have very low ability to visualize, so I've been interested in these threads. Yes, I can imagine smells. I'd never thought about it, so just now I tried imagining Arpège perfume, something I haven't smelled since the 80s, my mother wore it. I can do that. Also pizza, tea roses, sour milk, hay--pretty easy. I can hear chords in my head, "freeze" them and pick them apart to hear how they're stacked or inverted. I can imagine one melody line over another. To go to sleep I play music in my head, and have since I was little. If I want to remember a sequence of notes, I "place" them in space, and I can go back to them hours or days later and they're pretty much where I left them. I never thought much about any of this.
I first noticed the visualizing problem when I was homesick at summer camp and realized that without a photo I couldn't see my Mum's face. I can remember her, colour of hair, scent, softness of clothes, voice- but I can't see her. I'm terrible with faces. I can't really imagine my own, except as a sort of cartoon. And I've always had trouble with mental math, even adding 47 plus 23, imagined stacked on each other-- I can see the sum as a whole, but when I focus on a numeral the other ones jump and slide around, so soon I'm adding 74 plus 323. Has anyone found a work around for this? (I do use pencil and paper but wish I didn't have to). And why does this happen?
Brains are weird. That's pretty much it, I think.
I have aphantasia. When I first heard about it, I thought that I didn't have it, but after someone quizzed me about visualizing specific things I realized that I can't actually visualize specific things.
I don't know if I can hear a melody. I think I can, but maybe this is like when I thought I didn't have aphantasia.
I can do mental math, but it's hard for me to keep track of "large" things if I don't take shortcuts and I can't really "focus" on individual numerals. If I were adding 47 and 23 I'd think of that as 50 + 20 = 70, not 3 + 7, carry the 1, 4 + 2 + the carried 1.
If the problem were actually 74 + 323, I'd do that as (320 + 70) + (4 + 3) = 390 + 7 = 397.
I have no idea if that's useful for anyone else.
sral endorses Common Core math! And yay, I'm not the only one. (An emailing lurker said that Yglesias has aphantasia too, which just proves I don't keep up with what he writes.) I'm not sure what else anyone could generalize about the three of us and I'm really not sure how any of it connects to anything else, though I guess neither is anyone else really.
For addition, I find it easier to convert into hexadecimal numbers first. That way I don't need to carry the one as often.
If I were adding 47 and 23 I'd think of that as 50 + 20 = 70, not 3 + 7, carry the 1, 4 + 2 + the carried 1.
I read a book once about the methods of calculating prodigies, and they were basically that, write large.
I do similar things. I have an OK memory for numbers in my head, and am fine (although by no means prodigious, just average numerate person good) at mental math, but I always use shortcuts.
If the problem were actually 74 + 323, I'd do that as (320 + 70) + (4 + 3) = 390 + 7 = 397.
This is roughly how they're teaching it to small children nowadays. This is the point of ten frames and hundred frames and so on - to give the kids a better understanding that 74 and 323 themselves can be broken down into 10s, 100s, and units, and rearranged in order to make the addition easier.
(The other big piece is to teach the same concept in many different ways, so there's still number lines and so on. There is much less emphasis on algorithms, though.)
(Then the textbook manufacturers create incomprehensible messes when these ideas are scaled up.)
The math room at my son's school has chairs that rock a little bit. This seems like the best idea for teaching math ever. You can fidget more easily.
45, 46: The rise of 'gaslighting' has been fascinating to me. I'd literally never heard the term before 4-5(?) years ago, when my MIL accused (facetiously) me of doing it to her, and I looked at her blankly. She then explained the old movie to me (she's an old movie person). OK.
After that I would very occasionally read it being used in roughly the movie sense*, but with it becoming clear that there were feminist overtones**. And then, within the last year or so, it's exploded, and now it seems to mean (per 45) any time a man disagrees with a woman's interpretation of the world, or (per 46) that men seek to undermine women's self-confidence at every turn by flatly stating that what they know to be facts aren't.
It's probably in danger of being overused to meaninglessness--that's what the internet does--but I must say that, most times I see it and raise an eyebrow, it actually checks out as a plausible usage. That is, at first read it seems to be used to mean "behavior I, as a feminist, dislike", but a closer reading reveals that, no, there's a clear aspect that really is gaslighting.
Come to think of it, I wonder if the catcall discussion is part of its rise: the timing seems right (I mean, someone on the internet is always debating how widespread catcalling is, but that one video from a couple years ago ISTM marked a bit of a turning point), and men insisting that catcalling hardly ever happens seems like a pretty good example of non-movie gaslighting.
*the key being that, in the movie, the villain is creating these situations: he moves a table (or whatever) and then tell the woman that the table was never in the old location. He's not just telling her that she's wrong to think that construction workers catcall her, he's directly deceiving her.
**that is, at least as MIL explained it to me, the movie is about one person trying to drive another mad. The feminist subtext is pretty clear, but the villain isn't trying to subtly undermine the protagonist's self-confidence so that he can advance in the executive ranks or whatever, he's trying to literally make her think she's crazy, I guess for insurance purposes or something?
56: I always rocked chairs whether they were supposed to rock on not with occasionally tragic/hilarious/legendary results.
I can imagine the smell of gaslight.
58: I suppose it's impossible for me to write "rock" and not follow it with "on", but that was supposed to be "or".
BTW, for the record, picturing things in my head is essential to my job, but I'm pretty good at other forms of conjuring senses: music, even though I can't carry a tune*, tastes, and smells. Tastes I get super-vivid, whereas smells tend to require more effort and usually a memory picture. That is, if I can really isolate a time & place, my brain can approximate a smell, but I can't do it nearly as easily as with food, where, almost as soon as I identify the sought-after flavor, it's there (not always vividly, but even so).
*it's not clear to me where my musical aptitude is. My mom said I could carry a tune well when I was little, and both of her parents had excellent musical ears (Grandma had perfect pitch). OTOH, most musical discussion baffles me; I don't feel like I can "hear" things like minor keys or blue notes in any meaningful way. OTTH, when Iris started taking piano, I quickly discovered that I could hear what she played right and wrong effortlessly, despite never having taken a single lesson.
58: Me also. That's why I like the idea of chairs that let the kids rock. They aren't on full, curved runners like an actual rocking chair. Maybe 3 inches of curve, plus pegs that stop them from going too far.
Mental arithmetic is just a matter of buffer size, isn't it? It's not that hard to work out a decent strategy and the rest is just juggling digits.
music, even though I can't carry a tune*
I've always been a bit mystified that I can see something so clearly, and static, in my head, and then I can't draw it. I know how to trace something. I can badly copy something. But if I try to draw something, it doesn't even look like my bad copy - it looks like a cartoony version of a universal consciousness version of what the thing is supposed to be drawn as.
That's overstating it a little bit. If I really tried, my version of a tree wouldn't have to be a column with a green cloud on top. But it could.
I can't draw for shit either. It never bothered me before, but not it does.
I can't really imagine my own, except as a sort of cartoon.
I think this is very common. Scott McCloud discusses this in Understanding Comics.
I have always been profoundly affected by music (and am, weirdly, listening to a lot of Beatles music that I haven't heard since childhood now) but was conscious only of rhythm and a kind of synaesthesia (timbres, rather than notes, have strong colours and indistinct shapes to me) until I got into acid. After that I could hear single notes distinctly and fairly accurately but chords, however they moved me, outstripped my processing power completely. It's almost like blindsight. I can listen to stuff like Bach's cellos suites in gape-mouthed incredulity that anything could be so perfect and so powerful, but I can't afterwards remember or reproduce the melodies.
I lost a lot of hearing in one ear after a bout of Menières disease some years ago. Curiously I would say that my musical appreciation has got deeper since then, and so has my ability to discriminate between tones. Presumably complete deafness will accompany perfect pitch.
I imagine that this is all some fault with the processing pipeline -- perhaps it is just too narrow a bandwidth -- rather than the hardware.
But coming out of the mountains where Ume and I walked for 12 days without water or electricity or any signal at all I found background music in restaurants or anywhere else hideously disturbing for some days. Only listening in a concentrated way to real music purged that discomfort.
69.2: Did you have that tested? You might be like the aural equivalent of that woman who did this while restoring a painting.
Or you might be Beethoven or Bach, which ever one couldn't hear.
I've always been a bit mystified that I can see something so clearly, and static, in my head, and then I can't draw it.
Can you draw things that you can see clearly and static with your normal eyes?
Not well, but it looks like a choppy, bad, copy instead of a cartoony thing.
I can't really imagine my own, except as a sort of cartoon.
I buy into the Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain argument, that we don't generally learn to see the actual lines of things so we flatten everything out.
McCloud may make the same point.
75.3: McCloud is talking about why we easily identify with stick figures in comics.
Huh.
I can draw things that I can see, but I don't think my mental imagery is as clear as yours. Imagining something in my mind's eye is nothing like actually looking at it.
Drawing classes do involve a lot of "Stop thinking about it and just look at it! With your eyes, not your brain!"
I also, pretty often, have to struggle to figure out what it is that I'm looking at in real life. I could draw it fine, I just don't know what it is. (I think my depth perception has suffered some major setbacks in recent years, on top of whatever artsy-fartsy training damage I've inflicted on myself)
I can't hear music in my head really at all (always my downfall as a flautist) but I am quite good at retaining speech. I don't get what the difference is.
OT: There's a Squirtle near my office. How can I make it get to where I can catch it? Difficultly: I can't leave my desk because I'm on a call.
I can conjure up smells as well, or at least as well as I can anything else. I'm not convinced I'm actually recreating the experience of it as much as a representation of it. I have the qualitative information about it, but I'm not actually smelling it in my head for real. Smells are closest to that for me, though.
It's convenient when cooking because it makes it relatively easy to put flavors together in your imagination and get a feel for the result. I can't do that nearly as well with color combinations, and certainly not with sounds.
52/55: Oh. So THAT's what that common core stuff I see people ranting about on facebook is? That doesn't seem so bad in principle.
I definitely cannot remember or imagine smells in any meaningful sense.
Smells, ditto. I can't recall them except via some kind of verbal representation of them.
'Yeasty, a bit like the smell of just cut underbaked bread.'
But I'm not getting any experience of that, there's no 'quale' there, unlike sound and visual imagery.
My friend A works academically on the way we represent smells in language. It's quite interesting.
I think I agree with 82, if I understand it right. If you name or describe a smell, I know exactly what you're talking about, but I don't actually smell it in my mind unless it's there. Sounds and visuals, I do.
re: 83
Yes, that's what I meant, exactly.
83 is how I am with smells and tastes as well as visuals.
But there's somebody with a different brain who can, whenever they want, smell what The Rock is cooking.
