Culture

Turns Out Not Everyone Can Picture Things In Their Mind And Sorry, What?

Oh no, I just got over the whole "not everyone has an inner-monologue" thing.

by Michelle Rennex  11 February 2020
apple visualisation test

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If you were asked to imagine an apple in your mind, how much of the fruit would you actually be able to see?

Personally, I see nothing in my mind. But if you ask, I can tell you exactly what an apple is meant to look like. I can list the right dimensions, where light hits, the stalk length, the vibrant colour, the unique markings, but there is absolutely no way I could see what I describe in my mind.

However, apparently some people can. Some people can actually visualise the exact thing they imagine, which is baffling to a lot of people online.

Twitter user @premium__heart posed the question to her followers after discovering that people imagine things differently in their minds. “This is still blowing my mind lol. Close your eyes and imagine an apple. What do you see?,” she tweeted along with a photo of five heads representing imagination.

Starting at one, the images ranged from an extremely detailed apple to progressively more abstract versions, with the fifth head being completely blank.

The apple visualisation test has come up only weeks after the infamous “not everyone has an internal monologue” discovery. But everyone is just as confused. The apple photo started raising questions about what it means to “see” something in your mind.

It turns out that while people in team five can conceptualise things in their head, they can’t see a proper image when they close their eyes. This experience is actually a condition called aphantasia, which is characterised by a lack of functioning mind’s eye leading to an inability to visualise things mentally.

This concept really confused people in camp one who are used to vividly seeing the things they imagine. The apple visualisation test raised questions about how people dream and whether every brain dreams in images or just feelings. Which, honestly, has just stressed me out now because if I don’t visualise things, then my dreams could just be a big, fat lie.

However no one was more confused than the people who looked at the apple heads before reading the question. I guess they’re just doomed to visualise five apples at once forever.