I never realized people have a wide variety of ways that thoughts appear in their head.

One time my wife and I were doing a mindfulness exercise where a narrator guided us like this (roughly):

• you are near a stream with water flowing
• there are hills surrounding you
• there are trees
• their leaves are falling into the water and flowing downstream
• more leaves fall and go downstream
• etc., probably some stuff about putting your extra thoughts on the leaves

We each described out experience with the exercise. My wife thought it was peaceful and she described a vivid scene that once set up ran by itself. When new pieces of the scenario were added, they just appeared and worked automatically.

I had a different experience. I manually constructed each step and then was kind of stressed that the narrator went and changed everything on each new step. Why didn’t he mention these things all at once? For example, I placed the trees on the hills. When the leaves were falling on the water I had to reconstruct the scene with the trees near the water. Leaves falling and flowing was me manually animating each leaf and moving it downstream. I was following the instructions literally – whatever vibes my wife was picking up were lost on me. It was exhausting! I am pretty sure that was not the intent of the exercise (and I was never fond of these mindfulness exercises, now I know why!)

This was the first time I ever heard that somebody might imagine a scene different from the way I do. I thought Everybody is the Same.

Once I had this contrasting information I was able to go home and find out what this is called – that let me do more reading on what was going on. I found it particularly useful to use an LLM (I think ChatGPT in this case) to describe what happened and ask for a term – the first term I got was Low Absorption.

Low Absorption

Absorption is how much a person becomes absorbed in their mental imagery, especially in fantasy. A person with high absorption (my wife) has fully autonomous imagination. A person with low absorption (me) has to do everything manually.

Curiously this term originated in a study about how easy it is to be hypnotized. I might be immune!

Hypophantasia

Aphantasia is the inability to visualize mental images. Hypophantasia is a lesser form with very low, faint, or unstable visual mental imagery. Hyperphantasia has vivid imagery.

I find that my mental imagery looks a bit like a Lite-Brite. Sort of outlines of images. I think it is consciously directed. I can recall what things looked like, visualize maps or layouts, and easily picture complex structures in software.

Inner Speech

Related to these is what thinking “sounds like” in my brain (not looks like!). People who are more visual may experience a flow of images. Because of my hypophantasia I internally vocalize my thoughts, which is called Inner Speech. I am literally talking to myself to think. There is no audience, just me. It is not a rehearsal for what I will say, it is how my thoughts are realized. I do this when I am by myself.

Conscious thought is typically in full sentences, or at least sentence fragments. More spurious thoughts are single words: as I walk through a crowd I am thinking “left” and “avoid”, not full sentences.

The only voice in my head is my own. When I am thinking about other people I am making statements to myself: “I am hungry, perhaps X is also hungry”. This internal voice is not just stating facts, it is the execution of my thought process in my Functional Cognitive Architecture.

Per an LLM, the NT experience is a bit different: NT inner speech frequently incorporates Theory of Mind (ToM) Simulation. They do not just “think” a fact; they “simulate” a conversation. This voice often has Prosody (tone, pitch, and emotional cadence). They can “hear” the voice of a parent, a spouse, or an imagined antagonist.

A person more in the middle of the phantasia scale has images thrown in: when they think of a “dog,” they see a generic, nonspecific image of a dog while the word “dog” occurs in their inner speech.

My Experience: Memory

I described what it looks like in my mind above. I might have missed something: without the contrast of another point of view it is just “how I am”.

These factors also affect how our minds store and retrieve memories.

Per an LLM in NT people memory is a “mental time travel” event. Retrieval involves re-experiencing sensory data (smell, sight, emotion) and “feeling” the past self’s state.

For me, memories are bundles of facts, maybe some vague imagery. They are indexed by place and by activity. I can easily recall what I did at a particular place as a list of activities. I might remember who was there, but maybe not. I don’t relive my memories, I access a log of the events.

Thinking of “memories of the future” (called Prospection), I can imagine the scene when my dog dies (future). Perhaps it will be at the vet’s office and I will be holding him as he is put to sleep. I can’t really picture the scene, but I can feel my dog in my arms. I am tearing up a bit as I write this because it will be very sad.

Mentally I am modeling the weight and feel of my dog’s hair. I am calculating the physical sensation of a terminal loss. I feel the biological affect of this thought as if I were experiencing it. I don’t feel sad because of the emotions of the situation, I feel sad because my dog is being deleted from the universe – it is a literal loss of functionality.

This is called Semantic Prospection: I am knowing the facts and situation of what will occur.

Contrast this with the typical NT experience: they experience a mental movie and imagine how the dog feels, then they mirror that emotion or feel the void left by the loss of the dog. This is called Episodic Prospection – they feel the vibe of being there.