What happens in a mind that can't 'see' mental images

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• averyminya@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Aphantasia can be frustrating, but we aren’t without it entirely. During the hypnogogic stage of falling asleep we get to experience it.

  The one that I personally would find very difficult though is having aphantasia and not having an inner voice. I use it for a lot of things, from my music and compositions to working through things. Not picturing things - whatever, I have conceptualization and for me I am able to reference the relative size of whatever I’m “picturing” in relationship to the objects around it. The only thing aphantasia is difficult for for me is art. I do a lot of zentangles because I can just draw until it becomes something. When I was young the characters I would draw would always come out very similar and a big part of it is I just have trouble creating details beforehand. For similar reasons I’ve always enjoyed landscapes, because it’s more like the zentangle process.

  Other than that, detail recall is just factual and spatial instead of visual and spatial (for me). I don’t picture things, I remember them.

  The one thing that truly kills me about it though, really the only one. Memories. My younger memories I get a very vague image for, but everything else is pretty much just I know that it happened but I can’t remember every single visual detail. I know people who don’t have it don’t remember everything either though, but some do.

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