How do people with aphantasia play chess?

I've always suspected my wife has this, and I just inquired. She said she can't picture faces or things, but can recognize them. Her memories are more like feelings. I asked if she were separated from our daughter in an apocalypse, if she could remember what she looked like. She said, "I have no idea what she looks like right now."

Now she's in kind of a dark place.

I was a decently rated chess player (nationally) in my youth and I have level 5 aphantasia i.e. I see nothing at all.

While I absolutely cannot play or picture game states without a physical board in front of me like most pros can, I had no great difficulty otherwise.

I practiced with a friend at the same general skill level that was very good at playing sans voir, which incidentally is how I realized I don't have the same mental imagery as him. This was ~25 years ago, and I didn't run into the word aphantasia until around 2020.

Aphantasia is a condition that prevents people from creating mental imagery . It is rare, affecting only about 4% of the global population..... My visual memory is like looking through a frosted window. I see some colors and blobby shape and that's about it.

A friend of mine has aphantasia. It seems like she has trouble with some board games but not with others. If she can stare st the layout of the board she's usually fine. We've never played chess.

In addition to not being able to see anything in her head, she also cannot hear her own thoughts.

I have a middling case of aphantasia. I can create a basic image, blurry shapes, low detail, etc. with a lot of focus and concentration. I struggle immensely with faces I haven't seen a lot, and spatial orientation. Beyond that, I simply think in terms of words more than images.

As far as chess, this means I'm logically thinking out the moves, rather than mentally picturing it. I tend to get a bit overwheled trying to internalize the new board state after more than a couple of moves. I also don't play chess much, though, and would probably simply train that ability by playing more, just like someone without aphantasia will train visualizing more board shapes ahead.

Well I don't play chess in my head. That doesn't stop me from being a reasonably decent chess player when there's a physical board in front of me. I'm not sure why aphantasia would be considered relevant to chess?

You have an abstract concept of the board in your head. The logical connections are still there, there's just no image of a chess board that represents the moves. Basically the same way a computer thinks without images, too.

I have trouble visualizing faces in my mind. The more I focus on "seeing" somebody's face the less accurate it is.

It's funny, people make aphantasia out to be a huge disability but ironically that just feels like a lack of imagination on their part. The things where you actually need to see images instead of just abstract thinking are pretty rare.

What does it mean to visualize a chess position?

I don't exactly "render" the board or pieces. It's like when you look at a board, and then make connections and feel whatever you feel, I just recreate those things.

I assume it's similar to other people, but the phrase "not being able to create images" sounds like people do "render" things in their head.

I have this and have often wondered if it works against me. I have also been weirded out that it’s normal for people to actually “see” pictures in their head ever since I found out about this.

Anyways yes. This must be why I am not great at chess. Let’s blame it!

like people who don't have it? Chess is strategy, not art, or engineering.

Chess is a series of strategic moves. You just make them. Are yall out here experiencing some kind of bizarre 5d chess i've never experienced before?

source - me, i have it.

I just think about what moves they may make from what I can physically see. It works well enough but I'm not good at chess. That's most likely my ADHD working against me though not the aphantasia. Maybe both lol.

They project into the ceiling

I wonder if there are blind people with aphantasia.

I feel like the amount would either be close to none, or most of them.

TIL I have aphantasia

For those that don't have aphantasia, can you do a mental face swap or do other "edits" of mental imagery and keep it consistent in your mind?

And for those that do have it, how does remembering pictures work for you? Like the Mona Lisa, or an MC Escher, or the last supper? Is any memory purely word-based or do you get flashes of imagery that aren't really vivid but still there somewhere?

I ask because I'm not sure if I do or don't have it. I can imagine audio much more vividly and rich than imagery, but I can still recall pictures and images as images. I can create them, but if I try to go into detail or make "edits", I start losing it.

So like, I've heard about this for ages but I struggle understanding. I definitely cannot "see" anything when I close my eyes, I definitely cannot "see" anything in my mind/imagination. I can "picture" things but that picture is more or less an emotional feeling about the thing, I can imagine certain parts of it but it's more or less a conversation with myself about what I would see or experience about the thing, as if I were describing something that I'm feeling while blindfolded.

When they say visualize something in your head, do people actually see something as if they were looking at it? Else I just figured that visualizing meant more or less an analogy of how we make sense of the actual experience.

An article about it :- https://en.chessbase.com/post/aphantasia-in-chess

As someone who has aphatasia , I must say there is a difference . I feel like I have a better than average (at least for my ELO which is ~600) intuition but worse board awareness . I also can't easily search into the game tree , though that may also be due to lack of training .

They play it poorly. Source: aphantasiac with short term memory disabilities who can't learn chess well bcit's too much visualization and memory

It's just a made up fad condition. It's not a real thing.