Living with Aphantasia

Well, not everyone can do that. I can’t. When I close my eyes, it’s all just black. No pictures. No mental images. I can’t picture a house or a dog or anything else. I just can’t do it. Now when I mention this to people, it is amazing how many people don’t believe me. “Surely,” they insist, “you can picture things in your mind.” It doesn’t matter how much I reply that I just can’t; it is really hard for most people to imagine that this is actually true.

It took me many decades to realize that when people said they were picturing something that they meant they were actually forming a mental picture of something. It is like they really do have a mind’s eye. So, I can understand why people have a hard time grasping that I can’t form a mental picture; I had the same problem figuring out that other people actually can picture something. As hard as it is to believe, some people (well, most people) can actually see a house when they try to picture a house. They can also actually see their family members when they try to picture them.

To answer the most frequently asked question: yes, I can remember things just fine. I can even describe things. I can describe my office or my house perfectly well even if I am not there. It is not that I cannot remember what things look like; I just can’t picture them. I can also recognize things I have seen before. I just can’t picture them in the time between the times I am seeing them.

As far as I can tell, the only effect on my ability to recall things is that I have to actually notice something in order to remember it. Since I am not terribly observant of my physical surroundings, this means I am unlikely to recall all sorts of details. If you stop by my office and then ask me later on what you were wearing, I am highly unlikely to know. I can’t picture what you looked like when you were in my office, so unless I made a mental note that you were wearing, say, a blue Mount Holyoke Sweatshirt, I won’t even know you were wearing a sweatshirt. Presumably, however, someone with aphantasia who was more observant would remember such things.

It has been this way for my whole life, so there is nothing weird about it. It is not like I used to be able to picture things and then stopped being able to do so. I have never been able to picture things. The only revelation to me later in life was that other people could.

Then a year or so ago, I was merrily reading a survey and one of the question was “Do you have Aphantasia (an inability to picture things in your mind)?” To say I was stunned is an understatement. I don’t ever remember being more stunned. I had no idea the inability to form mental pictures had a name.

Obviously Google was the next stop. The phenomenon of aphantasia was first described by the polymath Francis Galton in the 1880s. There has been remarkably little study of the matter, though that is changing of late. Right around the time scientific study of the phenomenon picked up, Blake Ross (co–founder of Mozilla Firefox) wrote an essay on Facebook describing his shock at discovering other people actually can picture things; the post went viral. Then a bit later on, one of the co-founders of Pixar announced he too had no mind’s eye. So, two famous tech guys say they have this condition, and instantly everyone knows it is real.

It even shows up in brain scans. When someone is looking at a picture, there is a portion of the brain that lights up. Take away the picture and ask the person to visualize something and the same portion of the brain lights up. Well, for most people that is true. For some people, the portion of the brain which is active when looking at something has zero activity when there is no object being observed.

So yeah, it is real. I truly cannot picture things.

Now, there the matter would have rested, but for the fact that in my Google search, I discovered there is a Book! Like a moth to a flame, I bought it. Aphantasia: Experiences, Perceptions, and Insights by Alan Kendle. This is where I really want to say that people with aphantasia write remarkable and amazing books about the condition. I really want to say something nice about this book. Sigh.

Kendle’s book is primarily just a whole bunch of verbatim answers that people gave to a whole bunch of questions. I have no idea how many people are included or even how the questionnaire was distributed. To say this is not scientific study would be an understatement. But, maybe we can learn something by looking at the statements of an unknown number of non-random people?

The questions start off on the right note asking people to describe what they see when they try to picture something (all the answers are variants of “Nothing”—no surprise, this was, after all, the selection criterion to be included in the book). But then, the questions start wandering off to see how the inability to form a mental picture is related to other aspects of cognition.

Over the course of the book, we discover that aphantasia causes people to be really lousy at school and to be really great at school. It makes it harder to memorize things and it makes it easier to memorize things. It makes fiction less enjoyable and more enjoyable. It makes it easier to do mathematics and it makes it harder to do mathematics. It makes you take more photographs and it makes you take fewer photographs. It makes your memory better and it makes your memory worse. It has a big effect on your work life and family relationships and it has no effect on those things.

I could go on, but you get the point. One might think from reading these answers that aphantasia has no effect on life. After the questions about whether you can picture things, there is not a single question asked in this book on which the respondents have even remotely the same answer. There is no reason to assume, for example, that people with aphantasia are any better or worse at learning mathematics or foreign languages than a random cross section of the population.

That leads to the revelation I had when reading this book. Someone who cannot form mental pictures discovers that most everyone else can do so. There is even a name for the inability to form mental pictures. And suddenly every single other hardship or personal preference can be attributed to having aphantasia. If you like reading fiction, hated mathematics, and spend lots of time taking pictures, well, those things are because you have aphantasia! If you have trouble at work, but get along well with your immediate family, it is because you have aphantasia! If you are a superstar in your professional field, but are sort of monomaniacal about it, you guessed it, it is because you have aphantasia!

What is with the obvious intense desire to attribute every aspect of personality to a single thing? There is clearly a relief that the reason someone did poorly in school or has a hard time in relationships is because of this aphantasia thing. Kendle’s book is Exhibit A. He should have seen this set of answers and realized that there is absolutely no consistency in these answers and thus there is no reason to assume correlation.

I cannot picture things. That condition is described by the clinical term “Aphantasia.” And, that’s all there is to it.