The mystery of the mind's eye
“The aphantasia also explains...why, in contrast with most people I meet, I find it hard and unnatural to tell my life story."
Hey fellow human,
I impulsively decided to tidy the house this morning. Before I knew it, I was knee-deep in a raft of cardboard boxes I’d stowed in a cupboard six months ago on the off chance they’d be useful for selling clothes on Vinted one day (the theory is great, but it does require me to actually get around to doing the selling!).
I was rooting through the cardboard boxes trying to decide which ones I should keep versus take to the dump when I found a file I had no recollection of ever seeing before. (Shock - I had in fact seen it before, but I only realised this when I opened it to see the contents.) Sometimes there are scary surprises, like finding unpaid overdue bills or something I borrowed from a friend once and just never gave back. Other times, like this one, there are pleasant surprises.
Inside were stacks of my artwork from a couple of years ago. Ranging from the very beginning when I felt scared to put pen to paper, to the period where I became over-confident in my technical abilities (fake it ‘till you make it, right? Story of my life!) and started painting full intricate watercolour landscapes.
What was immediately obvious to me was that everything I ever chose to draw or paint was something that existed in front of me. Either a photo I took, or a reference I found online - or maybe another artist’s work I copied. It was all concrete, even though I remember so badly wanting to create something new. Something unseeable. Something imagined in my mind’s eye, and my mind’s eye only.
For example, one day my granny (who is a fantastic watercolour artist) asked me to paint a boat on the ocean as a card for one of our family members. I was completely stumped! I thought, how can this be? I know what a boat looks like. I know what the ocean looks like. How can I not translate that onto the page?
Now it makes sense to me: it turns out I don’t lack an imagination, but I do lack a visual mind’s eye. Well, actually, there are other senses I don’t recall in my mind’s eye either - like sound, taste, smell, or touch. The only sense I think I can imagine a little bit is movement.
When I close my eyes and look there is nothing - only blackness. I can’t see my loved one’s faces, I can’t replay memories, I can’t see a made-up world (fantasy or based on people or things I know in real-life). I used to think that when someone told me to count sheep to fall asleep, or listen to the ocean waves to calm me down, it was a metaphor. But no, some people - in fact a vast majority of people - have some sort of visual imagery in their mind’s eye.
There is a name for this: Aphantasia. In other words, “the inability to visualise” or “image-free thinking”. The Aphantasia Network explains:
“Visual imagination varies from person to person, like a spectrum. While most people can picture images in their minds, there are some who experience it more intensely or differently. On one end, there are people with aphantasia or “aphantasics,” who can’t visualize at all.
On the opposite end, are people with hyperphantasia or “hyperphantasics,” who have an incredibly vivid imagination. Their imagination is so vivid that it’s almost like they’re really seeing it. In between, there are variations, those with phantasia and hypophantasia, experiencing low to moderate levels of vividness.”
According to this 2022 study aphantasics with completely absent imagery, like me, make up 0.8% of the population.
I have been aware that I am aphantasic for a while, but only recently started to process it. This often happens to me; I’ll have a light bulb moment that illuminates my being in a new way and it’ll take months for the shock to bed in - a little like when someone turns the light on in a dark room. It took stumbling across this video about reading without an imagination this week to prompt me to reflect and think more deeply on how aphantasia shapes my internal world.
This is where I feel compelled to thank you. I felt isolated this week. My shitty committee (meaning my negative internal brain chatter, for those of you who are new here) made me feel like this was ‘yet another’ difference about me. So I decided to share how I was feeling in our group chat, and asked about your experiences with aphantasia. I felt so much better for feeling part of a group of people who get it. Thank you.
Anyway, I got thinking about how aphantasia explained why (as a person who is a veracious reader of non-fiction) I have never enjoyed reading fiction. Well, that is, until I realised I only enjoy certain types of fiction - stories that are heavy on plot and concept and character development, and light on description and fantasy.
I would love to love Harry Potter, for example, but I don’t and never did - I couldn’t see Harry’s scar, the sorting hat, or the sorcerer’s stone. In a book full of imagery that engages the reader’s senses, there is little room for a reader with aphantasia to remain absorbed. I remember trying time and time again to read it, and never making it past the first two pages. It sounds silly but it has since remained a source of confusion for me - I grew up in the heyday of Harry Potter when everyone I knew was obsessed. I, despite trying, could not take part and could not understand why.
Another aspect of life I find particularly interesting as an aphantasic is creativity. How does aphantasia impact my creative abilities? It is hard to know because I can’t know what it’s like to have a visual imagination. But what I do know is that I cannot create art from nothing. There has to be a starting point, whether that be a reference photo, a real-life object, or making a mark on the page and seeing where it takes me. The latter example means I have to trust the unknown - without mental imagery, I can’t see what I am creating before I start.
This differs from imagination. I have ideas, it’s just that they’re conceptual not visual. Much of the time it is a concept about a feeling or an emotion that I want to convey. I methodically and logically have to work out how to convey that feeling or emotion through imagery - either collecting and combining references, merging pre-existing media, or spontaneously mark-making .
In my online searches I came across a host of fascinating resources including The Extreme Imagination Exhibition that “challenges long-held beliefs about what it means to be creative”.
“The exhibitors demonstrate the diversity of means by which artworks can come into being. For the aphantasics, one of these means is to ‘copy’ directly from a source, be it an object in front of them or a group of photographs. Another is to just start making marks and see where they lead. A third is to make things out of other pre-existing things. Thus, having mental imagery is not a prerequisite for making art or even being creative.
One couldn’t know which of the artists were hyperphantasic and which were aphantasic just by looking at their work, or even, indeed, if there was anything unusual about their inner lives. And that is what the Extreme Imagination exhibition hints at: the diversity of the hidden routes to creation.”
Perhaps this is why I feel a particularly strong affinity to expressing myself creatively through words. I’m still figuring the details out, but if I were to think of a recent memory for example I would not see, hear, smell, taste, or touch anything in my mind’s eye but I would use the little motor imagery (mental simulation of a physical action) I have combined with a description of the memory in words to revisit that memory or communicate parts of it to someone else.
I believe this could be why writing serves such a rewarding purpose for me in keeping track of things - without visual imagery, memories quickly become difficult to recall and without writing them down I risk letting them drift into a consciousness I can’t re-access.
In fact, one of my deepest insecurities socially is that telling personal stories feels impossible because memories are so faint (literally). I rarely share information about myself that isn’t concrete and current. Not because I don’t want to, but because I don’t feel confident recalling stories to bond with others over. Now I know why: I don’t have a visual library to pull from.
I feel as though aphantasia means, whilst I do have memories, they are few and far between and they take longer to access. So, during a conversation in a social group on the rare occasion I do have an anecdote to share the conversation more often than not has moved on by the time I’ve recalled the information to share.
This also meant I found it challenging to bond with people over shared experiences and memories. As a kid I remember friends regularly talking about ‘when we did 'x, y, and z’ and I had to try to disguise the fact that I had no idea what they were talking about. I had been there, I had experienced the experience, but retrieving the memory was slow at best and impossible at worst. Reading this account of aphantasia explains my experience better than I can currently:
“The aphantasia also explains, at least in part, why, in contrast with most people I meet, I find it hard and unnatural to tell my life story. I don’t really think of my past, and when asked about it, I find it difficult to recall and recount. Nor have I ever had specific ideas or visions for my future – only abstract thoughts of wishing to be happy, intellectually stimulated, healthy, with good people in my life, and access to natural beauty.”
Honestly, now I know about aphantasia I feel a huge sense of relief. I will sound like a broken record to long-term readers but in my experience knowledge is power. If I understand why, I can learn to let go and accept.
I can’t change the way my brain works. I will never know what it’s like to be able to visualise in my mind’s eye. And I will never understand the full extent to which that impacts my creativity, my hobbies, or practical things in life like envisioning goals for myself. At least now I can learn to stop beating myself up for not meeting a (literally) impossible standard I set for myself.
I’m certain that there are beautiful things about aphantasia I have yet to reflect on. I know from various accounts I’ve stumbled across that aphantasia is not a deficit so much as a difference. They help me to find a sense of wonder in the unknown of aphantasia. For example, in this article in Psyche the author says:
“You might be feeling that, on the whole, people with aphantasia have a raw deal but, while it has some drawbacks, there are advantages too. For example, lack of distraction by emotional imagery might allow people with aphantasia to be ‘present’ in ways that some of us might envy, and it’s abundantly clear that aphantasia is compatible with high achievement: 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, Blake Ross, co-creator of Mozilla Firefox, and Oliver Sacks, the acclaimed neurological author, have all declared their aphantasia.”
I am already experimenting in my creative practice with trying to embrace the ‘constraints’ that aphantasia creates for me. After all, in the words of Leonardo da Vinci “art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.”
Thank you for reading, and I’m sending you love!
Charlie xoxo
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Thanks for sharing! Being an aphantasiac, I feel I excel in my work compared to those who can visualise things. When I design, I move things around based on what feels like good user experience to me and what makes me feel satisfied based on the sense I have of what it should do, rather than relying on mind's eye visualisation. This way, I don't get as attached to my initial ideas and don't mind redoing it until I'm happy with the outcome.
While reading, despite not imagining what's on the page, I find myself paying more attention to the flow of language and concepts. I particularly enjoy reading sci-fi and fantasy, where although I don't visualize characters, I grasp the concept they represent in the story. This has made me a more critical reader, which I think is lovely
Thanks, Charlie. It’s amazing how the brain works! Interestingly, I have a pretty robust visual brain (overlaid with continual streams of words!) but I have a poor memory for my experiences. I really don’t remember so many events and people from my past. I sort of hate it when someone says, “Remember when … “ because odds are I don’t - at all. I can mentally picture places, things, rooms, even processes, but I can’t remember events.