aphantasia

[queenlua]

Some number of years ago I stumbled on this blog post, "I don't see anything when I close my eyes".

The author says that he can't mentally "see" objects in his mind—for instance, if asked to imagine a red square, while he knows intellectually what it looks like, he can't really imagine/see it unless it's in front of him.

I found this fascinating to stumble upon, because I thought this was how everyone was. When people talked about seeing a picture in their mind, I thought it was just kind of a figure of speech, but this dude's post + various anecdata indicates most people actually do this, and I'm the weird one for not being able to picture things!

Anyway, this week I found a couple cool articles on this topic! Turns out researchers are starting to look into this, which I find exciting, because it seemed like such a tricky and quirky thing to study that we'd never get actual scientists on it, and yet here we are. Also it has a name now: "aphantasia."

Also, another person reports he's also unable to mentally "hear" music, which is fascinating to me. I can hear music in my mind, quite vividly, and have composed whole songs that way; it feels weird that not everyone can do this.

Other tidbits:

* I'm really curious if there are any good artists with visual aphantasia. I actually liked art a lot as a kid and drew lots up through middle school, but I wasn't excellent at it. I imagine with more training/effort I could've become good, but I wonder if I'd eventually hit difficulties once I got to Serious Business stuff? Like, I can imagine composing music without being able to hear music in the mind, but it'd be a huge pain in the ass, you'd be pretty reliant on synthesizer-like tools to experiment with sounds, and I imagine not having the ability to turn over different approaches in your mind would make iterations/improvements harder. But maybe not!

* Amusingly, I think this explains why I found it so impossible to find an approach for meditation that worked for me. A bunch of meditation guides have stuff like "start by imagining a white dot in your mind," and I think that was supposed to be the easy part, but I would get stuck there, trying and trying to conjure up a thing in my mind that just was not happening. Once I read a guide on walking meditation it all made much more sense.

Also if anyone else shares this experience let me know, because I'm super curious, join the aphantasia club etc etc

Comments

[rosage]

That's interesting! If you don't mind my asking, do you think this affects your writing process? I CAN visualize things, but usually don't while writing/reading, and I always have to remind myself to include more than just inner monologue+dialogue in stories as a result (and find it hard not to rely on stock phrases/descriptions for the visual side of things). I never felt your writing had that problem IIRC so I'm curious if you have a way around visualizing the things you describe.

[queenlua]

i thought about this a bit, and my answer's basically "maybe a bit, but not really that much." like, probably the first-order thing that affects my writing the most is just unconsciously imitating & drawing ideas from other stuff i've read, and that's more about imitating styles/tones/rhythm/etc; I would actually be a little surprised if even extremely-visualize-y people didn't use this as their primary source when writing. writing can be used to evoke images but it's not the image itself, i guess. idk?

it's true i get very little out of the sort of generic visual description you get of characters in novels sometimes, i.e. "she had pale skin and brown hair and green eyes"—that just doesn't stick in my memory, and i honestly just don't care about the facts of appearance. stuff that *will* stick in my mind is more about the bearing/atmosphere/mood around a character, i.e. the way the constant association between Heathcliff and the dark, windswept moors gives him a feeling of being very brooding and tragic and virile, a character having "the hunched look of a whipped pup," etc etc. but again, i suspect (though cannot prove; this could just be me being biased) that this is just better writing in general; even if you're a very visual thinker, it's going to be much more efficient, and effective, if you can get the scene in your mind across with a few sentences describing a mood than if you painstakingly describe the colors of object in the picture.

(and, thank you for the complement! in conclusion though i think it probably just comes down to random foibles; i certainly know things i do too much of in my own writing that are hard to clamp down on, haha)

[rosage]

Ahh, thanks for the thoughtful response. I suspect you're right about the descriptions. I've heard some readers say that it bothers them when they're not told hair color/eye color/etc., who from what they say I guess to be readers who visualize everything and want to know which actor to 'cast' in the role, etc., but that's not how I read, so it can be hard to know which details to include (talking about origfic and original characters of course). I think your priority of getting mood etc. across makes sense.

[amielleon]

FWIW, Professor Tammi has said that she can't visualize, and her contributions to fandom are primarily visual art. I think she posted about this at some point, and I responded to it on my tumblr.

[queenlua]

oh huh! i missed this but that's super-interesting; i indeed know her art! thanks~

[helicoprion]

IT'S ME. Mostly. I have a limited ability to visualize - I can only do it with concerted effort, can't sustain it for long, and it's disorienting and vaguely unsettling when I try! I realized at some point that it was something a majority of people did, and tried to train myself into it... but it has basically no relation to how I normally think of things. Even now I can only visualize things that are moving - static images are a no-go. I just tried to imagine a red square, and no dice.

I've also been trying to learn how to draw for the past [cough] years, and depending on which method one goes with, lack of visual imagination can be either a hindrance or a relative non-issue. Drawing from reference: cool! Sketching stuff out in an exploratory fashion: challenging but fine! The school of thought that says "you gotta plan every line before you lay it down": well, better pack up and go home. This might be why I have a hard time staying on-model when drawing people - I may have an intellectual idea of "they look kinda like this," but I don't actually know what they're gonna look like this time until I've already drawn it. A long-time favorite artist of mine once mentioned offhand that they don't visualize, and also have trouble making people look consistent... but they've got a kickass style and great technical chops, so clearly it's possible to get good regardless.

[queenlua]

yaaay more data points! thank ye