aphantasia

sometime in college it became apparent to me that other people visualize things much more intensely in their mind than i do. later i found out that i have aphantasia, the inability to mentally visualize things like many others. i realize when i talk about it to friends or family, that many people don’t actually know much about it. it was only coined as a term as recently as 2015 in Lives without imagery—Congenital aphantasia (Zeman & Della Sala).

a spectrum

like many things in our lives, and in neurodivergence, aphantasia is a spectrum. the classic example is to imagine a red apple in front of you. on one of the spectrum you have someone with the ability to visualize the apple clearly, and describe variations in its appearance like how waxy the skin is, the exact hue and variegation of the color, the size and shape, the presence of absence of leaves or a stem and so on. in the middle, you have people who can describe elements of the apple, but in less detail. eventually, who have no visualization at all. in the prevalence of aphantasia (imagery weakness) in the general population (Dance & Simmer 2022), they estimate that 3.9% of the population has some form of aphantasia, and only 0.8% has the most extreme subtype (fully absent imagery). while i don’t think i’m the most extreme, i definitely fall close - i do visualize when i dream, and i get the briefest flashes of images, but not in the traditional sense of visualization.

perception

while its obvious that we all have different perceptions, it seems surprising to me that many people didn’t know about aphantasia. even today, it sometimes surprises people to describe and they don’t really fully believe me at first, and ask, incredulously, “… but then what do do you see when you try to think of an apple?”. for me, describing the experience of memory feels so illusive and difficult to describe, its easy to be at loss for words. it isn’t as simple as remembering a face or a place or a particular scene, but somewhere between a feeling and an idea and the abstract sensation of of a memory. and granted, it is easy to go without asking someone about their internal reality and modes of perception. i think the realization that many don’t understand what aphantasia is, or have maybe ever thought of or even asked about the experience of others, is a reminder to me be more open and curious about learning how other people go through this world in their own special ways.

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