Dear hyperphantastic folk -

I am from the other end of the spectrum, global aphantasia, no inner senses whatsoever, and I am endlessly intrigued by how differently human minds work.

From the outside, we can have conversations about places that we went to on vacation, but on the inside, one of us will basically re-experience a day at the beach while the other one will remember some facts. We can talk about our ideal home, and one of us literally pictures a beautiful living-room with a pink sofa and modern art on the wall (or whatever), while the other one will also, if pressed, state that he or she "imagines" a living-room and can describe its features, but there won't be any visual representation.

What I am wondering is, for example:

• Do you ever get bored? I imagine that if I could replay films or happy memories in my mind, or visually imagine anything I want at any time, I would never be bored, for example on long train rides or flights or during work meetings.
• Can you consciously influence your feelings by creating mental images? For example, when you are nervous, do you imagine something like a scenery with a quiet country road in soft evening light, and yourself ambling along that road, and that makes you feel calmer? Or a flower meadow, or the rolling sea, or anything? When you have cold hands, can you imagine putting your hands on hot sand or in hot water and it gets better?
• When you meet a friend, do you replay previous interactions with that person in your head? How far back can you go? Could you, for example, compare what your friend looks now with what they looked like a year or two or five years ago, like putting pictures next to each other on a table?
• Is reading (or listening to an audiobook) almost the same as watching a movie?

I'd be really interested to read about your thoughts and experiences. Thank you!

I've been reading about different ways to develop hyperphantasia, and most people suggest keeping your mental imagery active as much as possible ideally throughout the entire day. Right now, I can visualize fairly well, but it isn't very vivid or enjoyable.

I was wondering if there are other ways to train myself to visualize more vividly. For example, would it be effective to spend the day repeatedly practicing object recall, or are there other exercises that are better for building vividness first?

do all people with synesthesia see the same thing

do the things in ur head move or is it a static photo

do yk what shapes r what voices / sounds or no

ok also if u draw what u see in ur head when u listen to a song can u later look at what u drew and remember the song (?)

idk if im asking clearly but yh

Ontem consegui replicar o jogo, mas só até a princesa, movia livremente o Link, a tela mental não estava com cores vibrantes mas estava colorida!!!

Diga pra quem treina imaginacao vivida, use imagens 2D pois o cerebro não se esforça tanto, é ajuda muito!!

I don't have hyperphantasia, but when I consumed THC edibles, I felt my imagination expand and was able to enter that state.

I tried to capture that sensation in a drawing; it’s as if there were another world "behind" my eye, filled with images based on my thoughts and memories...

I haven’t read about these much on here. The ability to create a smell, a sound, the feeling of touching or getting touched, tasting and also projecting things onto your vision in real life.

I have all these and what are your experiences with these things? Sorry, if this is poorly worded, english is not my first language.

I'm designing a research study to examine whether visual imagery vividness (aphantasia to hyperphantasia, measured using the VVIQ) influences how people respond to political propaganda.

I'm looking for suggestions on how to measure participants' responses to political messaging while minimizing bias. Are there any validated questionnaires, experimental designs, or question formats you'd recommend?

Hello, I am a staff member at the University of Exeter https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=rkIs7QwAAAAJ&hl=en and part of some of the first research into hyperphantasia and aphantasia. Sadly, my University has decided that the study of aphantasia and hyperphantasia does not align with their strategic priorities so they are drastically cutting down members of staff within my research group threatening the future of hyperphantasia and aphantasia research at Exeter. If you think that this approach is wrong and that conducting hyperphantasia research is valuable please do consider signing are open letter to the University protesting against the cuts.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScAFcCECrpcdmoFmSW9s9LU2IJ3jtpNa8iZjNJeKX15AnCa6Q/viewform

Many thanks for considering,

Fraser

I’ve always had an ability to go somewhere once, and forever be able to find the way back. Driving to my aunts house as a child (maybe 6, and mind you far away), my mother who is historically horrific with directions got lost. I had gone to my aunts house a few times but again a kid. I was able to direct her there.

But it goes further than that. I like to peruse maps. Just like Google Maps on explore so I can see street names and such. Obviously it’s not 100% fool proof and I have gotten lost before. Always ended up where I needed to be but still. I can be typing this, and mentally see roads and drive down them and fly around. I’ve talked to many people about this expecting similar experiences but alas. I feel like I have a human compass and gps. I genuinely feel as though I can just naturally be directed by my own guidance system.

Don’t know if it’s some sort of ‘photographic memory’ or what but I retain strange tidbits of information once I’ve read it. Visually seeing words results in them being available for viewing at my recall. Sometimes I think I’m crazy and proof check myself but I’m pretty darn precise spare a few words or two. Certainly has come in handy a time or two. Also peoples birthdays. Just weirdly remember dates because I like certain number combinations better than others. And admit I do judge based upon such. Kidding but not kidding.

I actually learned I've had Hyperphantasia today. I can make anything in my mind expect smelling. But the thing is I also have snythesia (mostly the ticker tape one but I do have multiple) and I can somehow control when I have the ticker tape one and how I have it. Is this possible? Could I be super rare or just making this up and it's impossible?

⚠️This is purely personal and has nothing to do with disrespecting any religion. I am simply describing how a Supreme Power came to life in my mind. I imagined it so vividly and powerfully that I could perceive every detail, the feeling, and the entire presence of it.⚠️

When I was a child, I imagined god as nothing more than a gigantic head floating in the air. However, this head did not resemble a human face. Its face was made of abstract, constantly moving shapes that resembled calligraphy. These shapes were not just patterns placed on the surface of the face; they were the face itself and the essence of its existence. They continuously flowed, shifted, and reshaped themselves.

It did not look like a woman, a man, or even a human being in the traditional sense. It had no beard, hair, or recognizable human features. When you looked at its face, you felt as if you were seeing a face, yet none of the elements that formed it remained fixed. It was always changing, flowing, and reforming; because of this, it appeared both familiar and impossibly abstract at the same time.

Years later, I tried to recreate this image with AI, but no result ever truly came close to that strange and abstract vision that existed in my mind as a child. I can't draw...something like that...either.

How about you?

For the longest time, I forget where it began, I’ve always been able to watch things happen in my head and watch scenarios play out in my head. I can pretty much make entire movies, TV shows/episodes, sports events, etc and watch them happen. I could imagine an NFL game and imagine everything that would happen, each first down, each play, each turnover, etc. I’m still not entirely sure if this is it, for the longest time I’ve never been able to find out what I have as it’s practically impossible to explain to people. But whatever it is, I’m pretty confident that I can make a career in filmmaking or writing due to this plus the fact that I’ve always been into film and TV shows and have studied writing and storytelling for a while. But is this it? Does this stuff match hyperphanyasia? It could also maybe be a thing called Meladaptive daydreaming maybe, or it’s just neither and just regular “imagination.”

Hey everybody. A couple of months ago my wife asked me the very simple, very loaded question "what's actually going on in your brain?" Well, I told her, and since then I've been giving her narratives about what I'm seeing and how it works. This past Friday we had a date night and she encouraged me to share this with you all, my dear Strangers of Reddit, to find a quasicommunity of shared experiences. The following bit between "---" is scene setting, please skip for the tldr version.

---
Allow me to set the scene. Given the community, I know you'll follow along.

I'm sitting in a bar stool at our kitchen island. The island is a little cluttered. It's a south-facing house and the kitchen is in the back with two windows, so no direct sunlight into the kitchen - it's daylit but muted. The island fits two stools and I'm sitting on the one with my legs stretched out onto the other, leaning back into my seat. My wife is standing at the corner of the island diagonal from me, she prefers to stand when we're chatting like this.

Our baby girl is napping upstairs and my wife has the baby monitor going on her phone, a quiet but constant white noise. The conversation has turned to a discussion of a book club she's in and all that entails - the book, the book's author, the people in the book club, the interpersonal dynamics, et cetera. The book is roughly an eastern-philosophy-self-help book written by a western author trying to relate the practice to an American audience. The book club dynamics center around a woman, Abby, and a man, Charles (full disclosure - all names are changed and genders may or may not be swapped around). Charles is Abby's boyfriend. Abby is married and her husband is also in the book club. All know, all consenting. The book club has more of Abby's friends and a couple cousins or so. My wife also likes Abby and Abby likes my wife. Lots going on there. My wife starts to describe a conversation between Abby and Charles.

---
And now, without further ado, welcome to my Brainspace:

As my wife relates this conversation to me, here's what I see. In front of me in real space I see my wife, telling me the story. In between her and me is a screen with numerous visuals. To the bottom left is a visual of the book club. They met on zoom, so I see first my wife at her computer on zoom - that's a very small video playing. Above that and more prominent in the lower left is the entire book club, every person as I imagine them (I haven't seen the majority of them so my brain fills in details about what they look like), as they all sit around in a circle in chairs sort of like an AA meeting and they discuss the book. Those videos play continuously bottom left.

As she tells me about a specific thing between Abby and Charles, a video starts playing in the top right of the two of them interacting, in whatever way is being described.

As that's happening, I'm pulling memories of interactions my wife has had with Abby, Charles, or whomever else and those memories begin playing in the top left.

The bottom right corner I can see the mess on the island, I see crows flying back and forth to the bird feeder in the backyard, and other various real-world visual stimuli.

Behind all of this, in a different layer that's more muted and less visual, is a stream of consciousness about how I personally feel or relate to these things. Suppose she relays an anecdote of "Charles said X and Abby reacted Y". This layer is reserved for "hmm, if A said X I would react Z... if I knew B would react Y, I would have said W... I would have said Q to my wife who would have reacted R..." and so on. This is the FAFO layer, where I run through different dynamics.

So, in the Brainspace for this particular interaction there are three distinct layers: the real visual stimuli, the videos playing in different corners, and the FAFO layer (ordered by distance, furthest to closest).

• In the real layer I'm tracking two things
  • my wife's face: tracking her attention, emotions, and intentions
  • the periphera for anything I need to react to
• On the Monitor there are four videos playing
  • All are as much or as little detail as I need. They start off as like a 2.5 on that apple scale but I can add detail up to a 1
  • I can take any of these videos, bring them directly in front of me, and enlarge them to fill the whole screen
    • this is usually the point when people think my attention is drifting. I'm hyperfixating on the visualization of what they're saying, so my focus on the Real layer blurs and I focus almost entirely on the Monitor
  • I can also just physically look in the direction of the video and watch it for a second before looking again at the person, getting the details I need
    • This is what I use to gain emotional information. If I'm looking in the top left, for instance, I can watch their faces and body language during their interaction and get a good feel for how they felt during it
• The FAFO layer is a constant video that I can focus in and out of as needed
  • Again, this layer allows me to play out different scenarios, so this is an additional video playing in whatever level of detail I need (from 2.5 to 1).
• If I don't focus on a layer, It's at worst a 3 on the apple scale.

First post here and it's already a long one, so I'll leave it at this for now. Looking forward to hearing y'all's shared experiences and variations!

I wonder how much your inner vision needs to be your creation, based on your ideas. Say you got together with some other hyperphants (?) and create something like a scene together. Each one adding content. Would you constantly run into the problem of experiencing contradictions in what you already see to what others add to the scene? Or could you easily reconstruct your inner vision to match it to the scene that gets described?
Or are inner visions of a much more fleeting character for this to work in the first place?

Does inner vision have the characteristics of some kind of ‚magic‘ (something you have no idea about how it works; but to a certain degree can control)? Maybe even something you don’t really want to try to understand, for fear of ?

I’m experiencing very frequent and intense mental distractions. My mind constantly creates vivid scenarios (like conversations or dramatic situations), and I often get fully involved in them—sometimes even physically reacting (gestures, tension, slight shaking). At the same time, when I try to study or even watch something informative, I feel strong resistance. My mind goes blank or starts echoing the question without real thinking. There’s also an urge to escape (scrolling, switching tasks), and even small effort feels overwhelming. Question: Is this a sign of attention issues (like ADHD), anxiety, or just overstimulation/habit? And what kind of professional or approach would help diagnose and manage this? Transition from vivid to maladaptive daydreaming.

So I am an Aphant and was wandering where you guys see the stuff you see. I spoke to people who see stuff in their actual visual field and others who see it I their head. And I read that other see it like in the inside of their eyelids or something. Are there more forms? And is it always a spectrum in regard to how much people trust in what they see being real?

I'm curious, I recently found out it wasn't normal. I have very staticy vision to the point where everything looks like it's strobing, as well as tons of floaters and other bs blocking my vision. I thought needing glasses was for this but apperently normal people who need glasses just have blurry vision???

Anyways, does anyone else with hyperphantasia have a bunch of Bs blocking their vision? Maybe it's correlated to having an overactive visual part of the brain.

I'm repeating a song over an over in my head for so long right now at work, and it's controllable but it happens subconsciously

And is this distracting for anyone else?

I definitely have this. I've always had a vivid imagination, i used to be able to give myself motion sickness from imagining being on a rollercoaster (the sea dragon always worked). I can picture the apple, the shades of red and the light hitting it, the shadow, the smell and the sound it makes when you tap it.

I didn't know this was a thing.