I remember telling a friend about my aphantasia, my inability to visualize images. I explained to him how I saw nothing in my mind. Everything I imagined consisted of abstract, picture-less forms.
He paused — then said, “That’s scary.”
I was surprised. It had never occurred to me that aphantasia might be scary.
For most of my life, aphantasia wasn’t something I knew existed; I assumed people were like me, and that this was normal.
“No one sees images,” I told myself. “They feel their impressions.”
That changed in my sophomore year in high school: I realized that people really do picture scenes in their heads — that the instructions to “picture” or “envision” something were meant to be taken literally.
Knowing about aphantasia now, I wonder how it has impacted me. For one, I’ve never enjoyed reading long, descriptive scenes in books. When I wasn’t skimming such passages, my mind would literally exhaust itself trying to understand how each element built on the previous one, what qualities of color and hue and shape they inhabited; I was attempting to construct a scene my mind was physically incapable of building.
For another, I struggle with memory. Events in my past are fuzzy because they have no image. They consist of audio, dialogue and a lingering emotional nostalgia. Even when these emotions burst forth as memory, my narrative accounts of them are frequently lost; I mix up who was present, what they were doing and how they were doing it.
Ask me to describe my mother, and I could give you some details. At least the basic ones: she’s shorter than me, wears her hair short and has a dimple (or two?) when she smiles. But I can’t assemble these words into something visual. She remains a collection of facts rather than any sort of image. And yet I recognize her instantly.
It isn’t these physical traits that allow for this recognition; it’s the feelings and qualities that surface when I see her, and I realize I associate this combination of love, wit, playfulness and apprehension with my mother.
At the same time, when investigated, this idea becomes circular: if my emotions are the source of recognition, how do they recognize faces without themselves as a basis? Certainly, it is the visual that gives rise to my emotions, but how and why I can’t consciously access that portion of my brain remains unknown to me.
In a UCLA cognitive psychology course I took, I learned that there are two mechanisms for facial recognition. One is cognitive appraisal, which involves knowing what a person looks like and stitching together a whole face given its individual parts. The second is emotional appraisal, which involves feelings of familiarity invoked when recognizing a face. It seems I lack the former, but not the latter.
I know what it’s like to have a complete imagination because, common with other aphants, I dream visually; my dreams are a cascade of textures and images that furnish my mind — that fade the moment I open my eyes. How I remember my dreams and how I dream involve two fundamentally separate processes.
But as bleak as I make aphantasia sound, I’ve never considered it oppressive. I’ve never felt out of place — neither before nor after I learned I was an aphant. Perhaps it reflects the fortunate and supportive environment I grew up in.
That comfort, however, may have led to a careless diagnosis of its effects.
Truthfully, I don’t know whether my weakened memory is caused by aphantasia; it could be due to a lack of concentration. My difficulty with reading descriptive prose could be due to a lack of patience. I’ve only pitched these ideas together because they offer a source of cohesion that’s hard to find in my actual life.
I fear that what I’ve been doing is justifying who I’ve become with a satisfying — but possibly false — reason.
The scientific literature on the consequences of aphantasia is thin and conflicting. There are those who observe its adverse effects, and there are others who claim such effects are overstated. Without conclusions, I find myself hoping: I hope my creativity isn’t hampered. I hope, too, that identifying with aphantasia doesn’t create a self-perpetuating constraint.
So the question I’m left with isn’t how aphantasia affects me — it’s whether I’d even be able to tell. I’m scared to get it wrong.
