No, I Don’t See What You’re Saying.
Fun fact about me, number 4,233: I have aphantasia. (For fun facts 1-4,232, read my mind and look at my memories… if you can, and if you dare.)
This means that I cannot create any mental imagery at all. At least, that’s how it’s usually described. In my case, I like to say that I can’t create any visual mental imagery because, having lived over five decades now, I think I’ve found ways to hold the shape of a thing in my head, even though I can’t see it. So I sort of have “geometrical” visualisation without the visual element.
I’m no neuroscientist, but I do have a hypothesis about what’s missing from the usual chain of brain activity to cause this apparent deficit. I read somewhere that visualisaion begins in the frontal lobe, which sends a visual idea to the parietal lobe, and (here’s the relevant part) the parietal lobe communicates with the occipital lobe (the place that processes images from the eyes). It’s all a bit hand-wavy, but I reckon it’s that last part that doesn’t work the same in my brain as other people’s (one estimate is that 2% of us have aphantasia). This means that my attempts to visualise might be getting “stuck” in my parietal lobe and going no further.
What I find fascinating about the above is that the parietal lobe is apparently involved in thinking about shapes and geometrical relationships. I do wonder whether this is why, despite not seeing any mental images, I can nevertheless “feel the shapes” and even reason about how they might change when rotated (I can do those geometrical IQ puzzles, just not very fast).
One of the other things that occupy my attention is the question of whether I ever had a mind’s eye when I was a child. I think it possible that I did, and that I’ve forgotten. After all, our memories are known to be malleable and fallible things that are constantly being edited when recalled, and also I believe it’s true that in very young children the brain is more massively interconnected, the networks becoming more localised as one grows older – this seems suggestive to me, in that it could be that mental imagery is something most people retain, but a few of us “grow out of”. Again, this is only speculation. All I know is that, in common with a lot of aphantasiacs, I find the idea of counting sheep to get to sleep utterly baffling.
Occasionally people ask me whether this affects my ability to write. My reply is usually that I’ve “had no complaints so far”, but of course this is an attempt at humour. The truth is that I don’t yet really know whether my descriptions are of a publishable standard because I’ve not been published. All I have to go on is the feedback of family, friends and other writers. I do make an effort to add visual details to scenes, but I suppose it’s possible that, not having a mind’s eye myself, I might not really know what to add. This seems to me similar to an artist who is tasked with making a pencil sketch with enough lines to bring a scene to life: the question is, which lines should be included? A good artist will know, but a bad one may well use too many, or the wrong ones, and the result will feel awkward. I sometimes worry that I might be doing that in my descriptive passages. I imagine visualisers reading my work might be thinking “yes, yes, yes, you don’t need to describe detail X because obviously my brain’s already filled it in – tell us about detail Y instead!”
Am I worrying about nothing? I really have no idea, as yet. I’ve read a lot of my work to a writers’ group I used to belong to, and had generally positive feedback, but the problem is really this: if people are filling in the details that I’ve “missed out”, maybe they don’t even know they’ve done that. Perhaps they’re such good visualisers that once they have a complete scene in their head they can’t remember which parts of it were described in the text and which were invented in their own heads. Who’s to know whether a person with somewhat worse visualisation skills might have found the scene to have insufficient detail in it?
Here’s the start of a story I wrote called The Pilgrims:
Sunbeams speared the small clearing like theatrical spotlights, filled with drifting dust and tiny dancing flies. On a moss-covered hillock in the middle, an old oak stood still, effortlessly existing. In the bark near the base of its trunk was a pattern of scars, carved long ago with a knife. Today, as every day, the tree could feel their sting.
Is that enough for you to fill in the details of the scene? What did you add? Ferns? Butterflies? Perhaps a bird on a branch? I wouldn’t know: I can’t do that so I don’t bother. When I read a paragraph like that, I sort of hold a “flavour” of the scene in my head, which I believe might consist of links to language networks in my brain, to concepts like “dark”, “trees”, “sunlight”, “moss”, “hillock” etc. This set of links is really my equivalent of the mental image, so it already comes with a bunch of associations such as “butterfly”, “bird”, “fern” and anything else that might be found in such a place. These associations are the reason I can write a description perfectly well if I try hard enough, despite not being able to see any of it. I’m working from the words. But is that enough for me to know how to “tune” the prose to suit a “typical” visualising reader?
I’d like to know what you think about this. If you’re a visualiser who reads, or perhaps writes as well – or indeed, if you’re a fellow aphant who reads or writes, please go ahead and share your opinion with me. This is one of those strange topics that are ambiguous, in that I can’t figure out whether I need to worry about them or not, and I’d love to have a conversation about it.
