The Blind Mind
Reading and Writing With Aphantasia
As I have mentioned in Shelf Life before, as recently as last week, I have a large assortment of cool friends. There’s not some kind of rule that you have to be cool to be friends with me. I am not cool myself so it would be hypocritical and unfair to expect all my friends to be cool people. Maybe they just seem cool to me because I’m comparing them with myself. I’m not sure. I also have an easy time making friends. I make cool new friends everywhere I go. It’s my secret superpower. I am the kind of gravity well that interesting people fall into and get stuck. It’s fine.
I hope you are ready for longform rambling because I do not have a heading structure for you today. It was my intent to load last week and this week with softballs, so to speak, as a bit of a winter break for the Shelf Life staff, population one human. Since I am constitutionally incapable of cutting an article off shorter than 2000 words, I am giving myself a little break in a different way. By not slaving over a hot word processor all night crafting headings for you. Consider yourself fortunate that you got paragraph breaks. Happy holidays.
A few years ago, I was playing an online game that requires groups of four players to work together. You can play with your friends, or if you’re playing alone the game will match you up with three others at random. Everything is more fun with friends, naturally, but I was on my own one day and took my chances with the matchmaker. You sign up and get matched and dumped into a dungeon to fight through together.
As a rule, random dungeon groups proceed with only the most cursory communication needed to accomplish the objective and after the dungeon is over everybody says GG (that’s “good game,” for the uninitiated) and goes their separate ways. I am dedicated to making games more fun rather than less but nobody else is interested in that. I don’t play online games anymore because the social element from the late 1990s/early 2000s era is gone. I’m doing my best to revive it. That usually means trying to strike up a hilarious running commentary of whatever random dungeon we land in. Mostly that was ignored but every now and then I would get a very concrete “healer pls stfu.”
On this day in particular, playing the online game as I mentioned, I was paired up with three randos from the whole wide universe of people playing the same game on the same server right at that same moment. Rando Number One and Rando Number Two have faded completely from memory, but Rando Number Three commenced a hilarious running commentary of whatever random dungeon we landed in and I thought, somehow the game matchmaking system found my game soulmate.
After we completed the dungeon and said our obligatory GGs, he and I hung around a bit and chatted and then ended up running some more dungeons together. We friend-listed each other, and over time evolved into IRL friends (that’s “in-real-life friends,” for the adults in the room). Rando Number Three, as it turns out, is a person by the name of Goñi Montes. Hit pause on Shelf Life and click that link. You can read the rest when you come back. Trust me on this.
The thing about having a fundamental difference from other people inside my mind is that I never knew my mind was different from anybody else’s. I didn’t realize there were different ways for the mind to be—at least, not in this way. If someone has curly hair and I have straight hair, I can see that difference just by looking. If someone has 20/20 vision and I have advanced nearsightedness—which I do—we can very concretely quantify, describe, and understand the difference in functionality between her vision and mine. She can read the street sign at this distance and I see a green blur.
But a fundamental difference in the way two brains process and recall visual information? It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I even realized there was more than one way brains can do that. Someone at work had read an article about aphantasia, the condition of being unable to form or retain mental images. She said something along the lines of, “Can you even imagine what that would be like? Not being able to see things in your head?”
Until she said that, it had never occurred to me that other people might have this magical ability. That people can just see a picture again after they had seen it once by remembering, not a list of characteristics about the picture, but the picture itself? Further, that they could see things in their mind that they had never even seen with their eyes? I can do that with music. Once I’ve heard a song once or twice, I can recall it with absolute fidelity. The inside of my mind is always full of sound. Music I’ve heard before, the neverending narration of my inner monologue—but the space within is completely black.
I touched on this subject in Shelf Life once before, briefly, in my article on Choosing to Be a Great Writer. Sometime after I wrote that, Goñi mentioned to me that he hadn’t realized aphantasia is a thing. He experiences thought almost entirely in images. I suspect, from his description of the way he thinks, that Goñi actually experiences hyperphantasia—while a person with aphantasia experiences difficulty visualizing images, or cannot visualize images at all, a person with hyperphantasia has an easier time visualizing images than most people—to the extent that their visual imagery is multidimensional, highly detailed, and can even be moved around in space to be viewed from other angles.
Like most types of neurodiversity, everyone’s ability to visualize mental images falls somewhere on a spectrum. A person with intermediate aphantasia, like me, can’t see images in their mind at all. I’m pretty far down on one end of that spectrum, though some are even farther toward the extreme than me. Those with advanced aphantasia (also called total aphantasia) can’t reproduce any senses in their mind—they don’t even hear an internal monologue. Most people can visualize images to some degree: They may find it easy or hard, they may see images with a lot of detail or a little, but they can do it. And then at the far end of the spectrum from me is someone like Goñi, who experiences most of his thoughts as visuals.
I have a hard time imagining what it would be like to see images in my mind. For Goñi, because he was interested, I thought I’d write about what it is like to be completely blind behind your eyes.
Once upon a time, before I knew what aphantasia was, I went with my mom to see a movie that was based on a book we had both read. Afterward my mom said to me, “Wow, the particular place they went looked exactly like I pictured it!” What she meant was, when she read the book her brain took the descriptive text and created a mental image, and the movie’s portrayal was very close to the mental image she remembered. My brain does not work that way. Not at all.
What I understood her to mean was, “Wow, the particular place they went was made to the exact specifications described by the author.” If an author describes a place as being heavily forested, with a stream running through it, and foggy, I do not see a picture of that place in my mind. I keep a list of characteristics I know about it: it’s foggy, there are trees, there’s a stream—but my mind doesn’t make that into a picture. If I then see a picture of the place that was described I can look at it and say, “Ah, yes, this is as the author described. I can see that there are trees, and a stream, and that there is fog in the air.” If you remove the picture from in front of me, I can’t close my eyes and recall it. As soon as I’m not looking at it anymore, it’s gone.
I’ve seen pictures of the Mona Lisa a million times. I’ve seen the painting in person. I know that it’s small—smaller than I think it is, every time—it’s a painting of a woman wearing black, pictured from the midsection up, with dark hair and no eyebrows—someone get this girl some eyebrows—and it’s mostly yellow and brown and maybe kind of greeny? Either from age or because it was originally painted in those colors. But I can’t picture it when I close my eyes. If I concentrate, I can get as far as imagining a rectangle in the black space but if I try to fill it in with even a vague shape of a person, I lose the edges. It’s like trying to pick up a handful of water.
If your mind is neuroatypical in some way, you probably have developed workarounds and strategies for approximating the same functionality that a neurotypical person has. I cannot, for instance, recognize people’s faces unless I have seen them many, many times. I always recognize the people I know best—my family and closest friends—when I see them. People I don’t know as well or haven’t seen as often are much harder to recognize. I recognize them the same way I recognize the Mona Lisa: Through a brief verbal list of distinguishing characteristics that allow me to differentiate the people I know with a fairly good level of accuracy from all the other people I know—and all the people I don’t know at all.
This strategy lets me down often. If someone drastically changes their appearance by getting a different haircut, for instance, I might have a hard time recognizing them the next time I see them—especially if I know another person who has similar physical characteristics. And if two people have all the same characteristics, forget about it. It is impossible for me to distinguish them unless I’m seeing them side by side, even when other people can easily tell which is which one they’re looking at when they see only one of the two. I learned this the hard way when, after a year working with a woman who seemed to alternate between using the names “Emily” and “Amelia” and who had a stunningly broad array of job responsibilities, I found out I had been working with two cousins the whole time.
As it relates to Shelf Life—to my word-related life, that is—aphantasia affects every part of it. Reading is apparently different for me than it is for other people. I understand what I read and absorb information from it, but it doesn’t generate any accompanying visuals. This is the only way reading has ever been for me, so I have no idea what it would be like to read a book and see a bunch of images. That’s what movies are for. I feel like that would just be distracting, like trying to read and watch a movie at the same time.
When it comes to writing, I find that my experience of aphantasia makes it easier, not harder, to write descriptive text. I already think of visual images as lists of characteristic details expressed in words, so I don’t have to give a single thought to converting a mental image into verbiage to write it down.
That said, a lot of the fiction I write is science fiction and fantasy. It’s a little more challenging to describe something that I have not yet seen and catalogued in words inside my brain, and I certainly can’t imagine something I’ve never seen. I do a lot of thought experiments that tell me information about characters living in science fictional or fantasy worlds. How is their world different from ours—their actual planet—and how does that inform how the people living there may be physically different from us?
Even though I can’t visualize an alien, I can derive enough information about them that way to describe them. How would someone look different from me if their environment were exposed to more or less radiation from their star than mine? How would biologic creatures develop differently under more or less gravity than what we’re used to on Earth? Generally speaking, my best bet for imagining something that doesn’t exist is to begin with something that does exist and then gradually make small parts of it different.
When it comes to describing faces, I can’t visualize a person out of nothing, and I have a hard time imagining mannerisms for them as well. It helps me to think of a real person that I’ve seen in person or a fictional character that I’ve seen in a movie or television show who reminds me of the character I’m writing. Usually I’ll choose a few people, real and/or fictional to pull characteristics from. Then I’ll look at pictures of them, or watch clips of them if they’re characters, and create a mental list of the physical traits and mannerisms that I would like my character to have. What I come up with is, at least I hope, a composite of traits that is unique to my character and makes them feel faithful, in my mind, to the personality and attitude I have imagined for them.
Don’t even get me started on drawing something from imagination. Completely impossible. I’m at drawing level square-with-triangle-on-top-equals-house. If I want to draw something more elaborate, I have to be looking at it and it takes me forever because I have to describe the drawing process line by line, verbally, in my head to reproduce it. That said, I still enjoy doing simple drawings and my friends seem to enjoy getting them in the mail. I’ll never be able to pull an entire world of color and shape from my mind like Goñi can but that’s okay. I have his art to look at.
If a thousand words are worth a picture, I hope you have enjoyed these two. I’ve painted seventy-nine for you this year so far. Don’t forget to collect your last two later this week.
There is one more Shelf Life left in 2020 and I hope you will drop by on Thursday to check it out. I’m so excited that Shelf Life’s first year of publication ends on a publication day. Serendipity. Thursday’s article is a look at reading and writing goals for the year ahead. Have you already set yours? Let’s make some resolutions so we have something to break in 2021.
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