{"id":30884,"date":"2024-06-17T10:35:14","date_gmt":"2024-06-17T15:35:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mathewingram.blog\/?p=30884"},"modified":"2024-06-17T16:53:43","modified_gmt":"2024-06-17T21:53:43","slug":"aphantasia-when-you-try-to-picture-something-in-your-mind-and-nothing-happens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2024\/06\/17\/aphantasia-when-you-try-to-picture-something-in-your-mind-and-nothing-happens\/","title":{"rendered":"Aphantasia: When you try to picture something in your mind and nothing happens"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

(Note<\/strong><\/em>: This post was originally published in 2020, but I have been updating it regularly ever since as I learn more about this topic. Newest updates are at the bottom<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a difficult topic to talk about, since it involves things that happen exclusively inside your (or my) mind, which by definition can’t be experienced by anyone else. So it’s hard to even describe properly, since different people are going to experience things differently, even if we are trying to talk about the same thing. But here’s a question: When someone asks you to picture something in your mind — a horse, a sunset, a shiny red apple — and you close your eyes, what happens? Most people see a visual representation of that thing hovering in front of their “mind’s eye,” and in many cases it is in full colour, like they were looking at a photograph but in their mind. Some people can even rotate this virtual image in 3D. For me, there is nothing. Literally. Just a blank space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I obviously know what a horse and an apple and a sunset look like, and I can describe them in great detail. But if I try to think of what they look like with my eyes closed, I don’t see anything at all — not even a hazy representation of them. The best I can do is try to remember a photograph of a sunset I saw, or a horse, but even then it’s a memory of having seen something. It’s not just neutral objects either — this goes for loved ones, family members, pets, etc. I don’t see the person or the thing itself, in color, or even in black and white. I think it’s one of the reasons I take so many photographs of literally everything — the only way I can remember what people or things look like is to look at a picture. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve since learned that this is a phenomenon called “aphantasia,”<\/a> a condition that was first mentioned in the 1800s but not really studied until relatively recently (the man who coined the term in 2012 — Adam Zeman, a professor of cognitive and behavioural biology at the University of Exeter — wrote about his research and what he has learned since<\/a>). I started reading about aphantasia awhile back, when I came across two things at about the same time: One was a post by a friend on Facebook that mentioned that he has this condition, and the other was a post from Blake Ross, a famous software developer who was one of the original developers of the Mozilla Firefox browser, in which he described his gradual realization that he had the same condition<\/a>. In the post, entitled “When you are blind in your mind,” Ross says:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

\n

I can\u2019t \u201csee\u201d my father\u2019s face or a bouncing blue ball, my childhood bedroom or the run I went on ten minutes ago. I thought \u201ccounting sheep\u201d was a metaphor. I\u2019m 30 years old and I never knew a human could do any of this. And it is blowing my goddamned mind. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Ross linked to a New York Times story about a man who had surgery and when he awoke from the operation he complained that he had lost his imagination<\/a>. Eventually, they discovered that what he meant was he could no longer picture things in his mind. They did an MRI and watched when he looked at a photo of former British prime minister Tony Blair, then asked him to describe Tony Blair and looked to see if the same sections of the brain lit up as when he looked at the photo, and they did not (for most people, they would). And yet he could describe Blair without any problem, including details like the colour of his eyes. There’s more in this Scientific American piece<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

According to Zeman, there are plenty of creative people in a variety of fields other than Ross who also have this condition — Craig Venter, who led the first draft sequences of the human genome, Ed Catmull, past president of Pixar Disney and recent recipient of the Turing Prize for his work on computer-generated animation, and Oliver Sacks, the acclaimed neurologist and author of such ground-breaking books as “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat,” have all declared that they have aphantasia. Glen Keane, the award-winning animator of both The Little Mermaid<\/em> and Beauty and the Beast<\/em> has aphantasia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scientists now believe that it’s not something you either have or you don’t, that there’s a spectrum in which some people see virtually nothing when they visualize things, and others see either imagery or in some cases rich, totally photographic colours etc. (called hyperphantasia). One thing that I’ve found aphantasists have in common is that most of us never realized that we were any different from anyone else until — in some cases — quite late in life. I was in my 50’s, for example. I always wondered what the term “mind’s eye” referred to, but I assumed it was a metaphor for memory, so I didn’t think anything of it. When told to imagine myself on a beach, etc. for meditation purposes, I just tried to remember what a beach might look like, and thought that was normal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What’s interesting is that I think I have a pretty good imagination, and I also draw and paint, or at least did when I was younger, and I like to think I was pretty good at it. But I was never (and still am not) good at drawing or painting things that weren’t directly in front of me — and now I think that’s likely a result of not being able to picture those things in my mind. I also wonder whether this helps explain why I (and at least one of my daughters) don’t do very well with directions and maps — I can’t visualize the map or landmarks or routes. And I also wonder whether this helps explain why I take so many pictures — because looking at those pictures is the only way I can experience those memories. I also don’t have vivid dreams the way other people describe them — things happen, but it’s more like I experienced a book. There’s virtually nothing visual at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What makes this especially frustrating is that my wife has what amounts to the opposite condition — she has something called “synesthesia,” which involves a merging of senses, including usually a sense of colour<\/a>. So when she pictures letters and numbers, they are different colours (a number of musicians, including jazz great Duke Ellington and singer\/producer Pharrell Williams see colours when they hear music). This gives her a “mundane superpower,” which is that she can remember almost every number, date, birthday etc. she has ever seen or even heard of. So where I am missing something, she actually has extra abilities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to our daughter who is studying cognitive psychology, this could be a holdover from when she was in utero, when her synapses were initially forming connections. It’s a fascinating topic — but it’s also extremely difficult to discuss, because how do you describe something that is (or isn’t) only in your mind? It’s like talking about colours. Do you and I see red the same way, or have we just agreed to call something completely different by the same name? That’s a question for another day!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Update<\/strong>: I’ve learned that there are some related conditions that may be associated with aphantasia, and one of them is called SDAM or Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory<\/a> syndrome, which refers to a person’s inability to recall events that happened to them in the past in any detail. Some people have the opposite condition, often called hyper-memory, where they can remember specific details of incidents<\/a> that happened to them decades earlier. I always assumed that I just had a terrible memory for all kinds of things, but I definitely have difficulty remembering personal events even from a few years earlier, and even ones that theoretically made a big impression on me. So perhaps this is related.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

More updates<\/strong>: Since I wrote this in 2020, I’ve learned about some new elements of aphantasia and also synesthesia. For example, there’s a form of synesthesia called “ticker taping,”<\/a> where people with this ability see what amounts to closed captioning in their minds when someone is talking. When I mentioned this to my wife, she said she also has this form of synesthesia, but — like me with my aphantasia — never really thought about it, and\/or thought it was so common that it wasn’t worth mentioning. She said she mostly ignores it. I’ve also learned that some aphantasics (me included) can’t recall other senses either, such as sound — some people with a rich imagination can actually hear their favourite music whenever they want to, apparently. And some people have<\/a> an “inner voice” that they literally hear talking to them, which amazes me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a Facebook group devoted to aphantasia, I’ve learned that some people with this condition have visually rich and vivid dreams, while others (like me) have dreams that are either completely lacking in colour or are washed out. Some people have experimented with<\/a> psychedlic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin to see if that will create visual imagery for them — some say that it has, but I have taken both LSD and psilocybin several times (many years ago) and I never saw hallucinations or much visual imagery of any kind. Things appeared altered, and there were swirls and so on, but I never saw anything that wasn’t there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zeman and his colleagues thought that a lack of mental imagery meant that most aphantasics would wind up in scientific rather than creative trades, but he was surprised to find this isn’t always the case<\/a>. What he says he realized was that aphantasia might sometimes increase<\/em> rather than reduce interest in the visual world. “Deprived of the ability to contemplate the look of things in their mind\u2019s eye, their visual attention to the here and now might be heightened,” he wrote. “And lacking a mind\u2019s eye might also increase the motivation to represent the visual artistically.” Andrea Blomkvist, a researcher in the philosophy of cognitive science, said that her group had met<\/a> aphants who are not just skilled at non-visual jobs and hobbies, but are artists, writers, animators.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Update June 2024<\/strong>: I came across an episode of WNYC’s Radiolab podcast in which the producer of the segment, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, talks about not being able to visualize<\/a> things. What’s interesting is that she talks to a doctor who specializes in brain chemistry and he says he thinks he could use electrical stimulus to trigger mental images even in someone with aphantasia. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the end of the segment, however, the producer says she’s not sure she wants that, and talks about how a significant number of people with hyperphantasia \u2014 the ability to not only see mental images but control them and even interact with them \u2014 also have a variety of conditions such as anxiety disorder, PTSD, and schizophrenia. One person she interviews started visualizing things that then were overlaid on the real world and eventually wound up having a psychotic episode.<\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Note: This post was originally published in 2020, but I have been updating it regularly ever since as I learn more about this topic. Newest updates are at the bottom) This is a difficult topic to talk about, since it involves things that happen exclusively inside your (or my) mind, which by definition can’t be … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Aphantasia: When you try to picture something in your mind and nothing happens”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":true,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30884"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":261993,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30884\/revisions\/261993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}