{"id":285,"date":"2023-01-05T11:11:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-05T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/?p=285"},"modified":"2023-01-04T23:33:29","modified_gmt":"2023-01-04T23:33:29","slug":"no-i-dont-see-what-youre-saying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/2023\/01\/05\/no-i-dont-see-what-youre-saying\/","title":{"rendered":"No, I Don\u2019t See What You\u2019re Saying.<\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Fun fact about me, number 4,233: I have aphantasia<\/a>. (For fun facts 1-4,232, read my mind and look at my memories\u2026 if you can, and if you dare.)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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This means that I cannot create any mental imagery at all. At least, that\u2019s how it\u2019s usually described. In my case, I like to say that I can\u2019t create any visual<\/em> mental imagery because, having lived over five decades now, I think I\u2019ve found ways to hold the shape of a thing in my head, even though I can\u2019t see it. So I sort of have \u201cgeometrical\u201d visualisation without the visual element.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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I\u2019m no neuroscientist, but I do have a hypothesis about what\u2019s 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\u2019s the relevant part) the parietal lobe communicates with the occipital lobe (the place that processes images from the eyes). It\u2019s all a bit hand-wavy, but I reckon it\u2019s that last part that doesn\u2019t work the same in my brain as other people\u2019s (one estimate is that 2% of us have aphantasia). This means that my attempts to visualise might be getting \u201cstuck\u201d in my parietal lobe and going no further.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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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 \u201cfeel the shapes\u201d and even reason about how they might change when rotated (I can do those geometrical IQ puzzles, just not very fast).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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One of the other things that occupy my attention is the question of whether I ever had a mind\u2019s eye when I was a child. I think it possible that I did, and that I\u2019ve 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\u2019s true that in very young children the brain is more massively interconnected, the networks becoming more localised as one grows older \u2013 this seems suggestive to me, in that it could be that mental imagery is something most people retain, but a few of us \u201cgrow out of\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Occasionally people ask me whether this affects my ability to write. My reply is usually that I\u2019ve \u201chad no complaints so far\u201d, but of course this is an attempt at humour. The truth is that I don\u2019t yet really know whether my descriptions are of a publishable standard because I\u2019ve 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\u2019s possible that, not having a mind\u2019s 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 \u201cyes, yes, yes, you don\u2019t need to describe detail X because obviously my brain\u2019s already filled it in – tell us about detail Y instead!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Am I worrying about nothing? I really have no idea, as yet. I\u2019ve read a lot of my work to a writers\u2019 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\u2019ve \u201cmissed out\u201d, maybe they don\u2019t even know they\u2019ve done that. Perhaps they\u2019re such good visualisers that once they have a complete scene in their head they can\u2019t remember which parts of it were described in the text and which were invented in their own heads. Who\u2019s to know whether a person with somewhat worse visualisation skills might have found the scene to have insufficient detail in it?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Here\u2019s the start of a story I wrote called The Pilgrims<\/em>:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n

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\u2019t know: I can\u2019t do that so I don\u2019t bother. When I read a paragraph like that, I sort of hold a \u201cflavour\u201d of the scene in my head, which I believe might consist of links to language networks in my brain, to concepts like \u201cdark\u201d, \u201ctrees\u201d, \u201csunlight\u201d, \u201cmoss\u201d, \u201chillock\u201d etc. This set of links is really my equivalent of the mental image, so it already comes with a bunch of associations such as \u201cbutterfly\u201d, \u201cbird\u201d, \u201cfern\u201d 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\u2019m working from the words. But is that enough for me to know how to \u201ctune\u201d the prose to suit a \u201ctypical\u201d visualising reader?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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I\u2019d like to know what you think about this. If you\u2019re a visualiser who reads, or perhaps writes as well \u2013 or indeed, if you\u2019re 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\u2019t figure out whether I need to worry about them or not, and I\u2019d love to have a conversation about it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\nSunbeams speared the small clearing like theatrical spotlights, filled with drifting dust and tiny dancing flies. On a moss-covered hillock…\n<\/div>\n
Continue reading “No, I Don\u2019t See What You\u2019re Saying.<\/strong>”<\/span>…<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":291,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,10],"tags":[31],"class_list":["post-285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-autobiographical","category-writing","tag-aphantasia","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/black-rectangle.jpg?fit=820%2C497&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=285"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":290,"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285\/revisions\/290"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}