Questions And Thoughts About Aphantasia

I have mentioned aphantasia in several other articles, but in this one, I want to consider a few questions that have occurred to me over the past few months about other potential consequences of this somewhat rare condition (which is estimated to affect maybe 3% of people).

What Is Aphantasia?

Let’s start with a brief recap of what aphantasia is.

Put simply, it is the inability to picture things in your mind – the proverbial “mind’s eye”.

For example, if you ask most people to imagine a red ball, they would be able to close their eyes but still “see”, or, at least, conjure up a representation of, that red ball in their mind.

But if you have aphantasia, you cannot do that – your mind’s eye is, effectively, blind.

This short video does a great job of explaining what it is, and how it came to the attention of the scientific community:

I think the key take-aways from this video are:

1. People only began to investigate this unusual condition in 2010, after a man had a minor stroke which caused him to lose his ability to picture things in his mind.
2. Emotions can come from just visual imagery, and I’ll touch on this later.

My Questions About Aphantasia

The problem with this condition is that if you have the ability to visualize, then it’s natural to assume everybody does, and you find it difficult to imagine that others cannot. Conversely, if you do have this condition, then you naturally assume that everybody is like you, and to find that there are people who can see things with their eyes closed as clearly as if they were actually looking at something is hard to get your head around.

I discuss my personal experience with aphantasia, including how my late wife had an amazing visual brain, in this article about internal dialogues.

But apart from not being able to visualize anything, here are a few observations and questions that I have that may (or may not) relate to this condition:

• How is it that I cannot consciously conjure up images in my mind, and yet I am able to dream in pictures? As far as I know, my dreams are usually vivid, and in colour, so my brain clearly has the ability to “see” things internally.

  Does this mean that seeing things through your eyes uses a different part of your brain to dreaming, or is it the ability purely subconscious (for those with aphantasia)?

• As I touch on in the internal dialogues article mentioned above, does this mean that hypnosis is less effective for those with this condition, since we are unable to create the images suggested by the hypnotist?
• If, as the video above says, emotions can be created purely from visual imagery, is this why I am relatively emotionless?

  For example, I don’t feel what I think most people would call grief, and death doesn’t even make me sad (not even when my mother or my wife or any of my pets died)? In fact, I don’t think I have cried for almost 50 years now.

  I have been accused many times over the years of being cold and unfeeling, and while I think that’s not 100% true, I can definitely see how I come over that way.

  On the other hand, I rarely experience some of the more positive emotions either – joy or excitement, for example.

• Related to the above, my late wife would not look at disturbing pictures (e.g. dogs being abused, corpses) because once seen, she could not stop those images from popping into her head.

  In a similar vein, she rarely talked to me about her childhood because it conjured up unpleasant images that then wouldn’t go away.

  I do not have these problems at all – presumably because I cannot “see” things in my mind’s eye, which isn’t to say I enjoy looking at photos many would consider disturbing, but it doesn’t bother me if I do.

  And thinking about my childhood, or my first marriage which ended badly, is not an issue for me either – it all happened, probably more or less as I remember it, and I can’t change it, even if I wanted to, but I’m not haunted by visual reminders that persist.

• Does my inability to visualize anything make it more difficult to get lost within movies?

  For me, it is really hard to lose sight of the fact that it is all an illusion, with people playing roles in or on purpose-built sets using a variety of special effects.

  And when you combine that with the presence of so many plot holes and logic errors and inconsistencies in movies, it’s really easy to jar me back into reality.

• In Nick Kolenda’s fascinating book, The Tangled Mind, he talks about how a lot of what drives us, perhaps subconsciously, such as with making decisions, is our ability to simulate taking that action.

  However, with a faulty or non-existent visualization system, where it’s that much more difficult to simulate anything (Nick told me when I raised this point with him that simulation need not purely be visual, but I still think it’s likely the primary mechanism here), is this why many of the examples in his book just don’t work for me the way he says they work for most people?

  And in a similar vein, is this why a lot of common marketing tactics and gimmicks aren’t effective with me? (Or maybe that’s the result of being involved in online marketing for so long, but as far as I can recall, I have been, I think, largely immune to much of the marketing I’ve seen for most of my life.)

• I love writing poetry, particularly haiku, but when reading other people’s poetry, I often find it difficult to make sense of it.

  Is this because of my inability to visualize the imagery that should be conjured up by their words? Or is it connected to my brain, by default, tending to take things literally?

  I recall when I was in junior school, so I’d be about eight or nine, and I was totally unable to grasp the meaning of a few lines in a Shakespeare play (Coriolanus, I think). So maybe that was related to this condition too?

• Does having aphantasia make learning how to meditate more easy or more difficult?

  On the one hand, emptying your mind, visually at least, is easy, because all I ever see when I close my eyes is blackness, but on the other hands, trying to think of something to focus on is tricky.

• In fact, does this condition make any sort of learning more difficult?

  For me, my retention is not that great, and I think it’s almost always been that way – but is this related to aphantasia or not?

  If having no visual imagery skills makes it harder to paint pictures, internally, does this mean the connections between old and new information are weaker?

  And what about comprehension skills? Is this related to the learning issues?

  Or are my problem here connected to my being on the low end of the autism spectrum (in what would usually be referred to as high-functioning)?

• Would this explain why I am so bad at drawing?

  One of the skills of an artist, as far as I am concerned, is how they see the world and, presumably, picture it in their mind – but if you cannot create those images, does this make artistic pursuits more difficult?

• Are we born with aphantasia, or is it something that develops later?

  In the case of the man mentioned in the video above, it was clearly the result of his minor stroke, but is it possible that you develop this condition as a way of dealing with some sort of trauma?

  I honestly cannot recall whether I could visualize something as a young child or not, but as I say in the internal dialogues article referenced above, I did notice it when I started learning mnemonics, when I was about eight, and found myself unable to create the associative images required by those memory-training techniques.

  And while I cannot recall any specific traumatic event or series of experiences before that age, that doesn’t mean they didn’t happen, because those memories may have been repressed.

  However, what I do know is that a large proportion of the games and books I was bought as a young child were educational in nature. For example, I was bought a children’s encyclopaedia before I could read, and many of the jigsaw puzzles I was bought in those early years were maps of countries, where you had to correctly place the names of various cities.

  At the same time, I do not remember being encouraged to participate in any creative activities, such as drawing. Actually, I don’t think my parents were that interested in any of the arts either – they didn’t even listen to music until I was about four or five, when my dad bought his prized possession, a stereogram.

(Photo courtesy of EraBrighton.)

Yes, this is what state-of-the-art stereo equipment looked like in the early 1960s!

Conclusion

While the condition of aphantasia is real (there is, for example, a Reddit community for it, as well as a site called the Aphantasia Network), am I trying to connect too many other aspects of my personality and mind to it, or is it possible that there really are some knock-on effects?

After all, most humans (and many non-human animals) are highly visual creatures – they’ve had to be to survive over the millennia, so if some aspects of our visual mechanisms are impaired, or not even present, it seems reasonable that it could have repercussions in other parts of our brain.

The problem is, of course, that this condition, as the video says, was only really first investigated in 2010, and I’m not aware of that much research into it – yet.

Maybe that will change, and I think it would make for a fascinating set of studies.

But until that happens, I guess I’ll just have to ponder these questions myself, as well as others that I’m sure will occur to me sooner or later – and try to find a seeing eye dog for my mind’s eye.

Finally, there are people who say they have cured their aphantasia, although I cannot yet vouch for any of the methods described because I have not yet tried them – but I might, out of interest.

Additional Resources

These are suggestions for those who wish to delve deeper into any of the above:

1. Aphantasia Network
2. Curing Aphantasia (Note that I cannot vouch for whether what is taught on this site works or not.)

PS The image at the top of this article is deliberately just a black rectangle – because that what we aphantasia sufferers (or aphants) see in our mind’s eye. 🙂