I Have Aphantasia! Discovering the World of Mind-Blindness

My Aphantasia Awakening: A Mind Without Images

I was blown away when I recently stumbled upon the concept of aphantasia. All my life, I assumed everyone’s minds worked like mine, but it turns out I’m part of a unique group of people who experience the world a little differently.

My ‘aha!’ moment came after waking up from another night of my typical sightless dreams. I started wondering – do other people actually see memories like snapshots? Do they dream in vivid technicolor? A quick search led me down the aphantasia rabbit hole and everything clicked!

Understanding Aphantasia

Aphantasia is the inability to voluntarily create images in your head – the famed “mind’s eye.” If I ask you to picture your loved ones, or a scene from your favorite book, you can do it, right? I can’t. It’s a spectrum, so some people have complete aphantasia, while others might have very faint mental pictures.

Importantly, this isn’t a disorder or problem. It’s just a fascinating variation in how our amazing brains work.

What It’s Like to Live with Aphantasia

• No Visuals: No matter how hard I try, there’s just…blankness where a mental image should form.
• Beyond Sight: It can even affect my ability to imagine other senses – sounds, smells, tastes, or even how things feel.
• Since the Beginning: I was born this way, though some people develop aphantasia after illness or injury.
• The Impact: This affects everything – memory, dreams, how I process emotions, and probably even shaped my life path.

My Quirks – Aphantasia or Superpowers?

It’s not all surprising downsides. I realize now that my memory functions differently. I don’t recall the past in pictures, but rather concepts, features, and facts. This might be why I have a knack for remembering people I meet briefly or places I’ve only been to once. Maybe my brain isn’t storing excess image data?

The bittersweet part is, this might explain why I can’t recall my childhood. It’s frustrating, and definitely something I’ll be looking into.

Aphantasia is More Common Than You Think

This journey has been mind-blowing (no pun intended!). Learning about aphantasia makes me feel a bit less of an oddity and excited to understand myself better. And if you’re reading this and think, “Huh, that sounds like me”, welcome to the club!

A few interesting, and useful, links:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/
• https://aphantasia.com/guide/
• https://aphantasia.com/article/stories/multisensory-aphantasia/
• https://aphantasia.com/article/stories/meditation-with-aphantasia/ – explore ways to meditate without images
• https://aphantasia.com/article/stories/seeing-dragons/ – guided mediation
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
• https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2024/feb/26/what-is-aphantasia-like – crazy, published 3 days after this post