About a month ago, a friend in my editors chat group mentioned that she had only just discovered that she has aphantasia, or the inability to visualize. She said that she was stunned to discover that her husband could close his eyes and picture something, like an apple, and actually see an apple in his mind. She could not actually see an apple; she could just imagine an apple. It had never occurred to her before, and she is in her 50s. Well, guess what, here I am at age 60 and at that moment I learned that I too have aphantasia. When I close my eyes, all I see is black. I can think of an apple and imagine that it is round and green and shiny and has a stem and all that, but I don't actually see it in my mind's eye. Apparently my mind doesn't even have an eye.
I immediately fired off a text to the family and everyone replied, "Yes, when I close my eyes, I can actually see an apple."
Then a few days ago someone on my puzzle website happened to mention it and I said that I'd just found out I had it. She said she'd only found out recently, when someone else on that site talked about it.
Today I mentioned it in another group chat I'm in and one of those members said she'd just found out a few years ago that she has it, and another person's partner has it.
And so on. So although the experts think that less than 5% of the world's population has aphantasia, I imagine it's a much higher number because there must be people who go through their whole lives and never learn that they have it, as I might easily have done.
I found a story from Time magazine last year; the author, Nayantara Dutta, says "I hold all the projector slides and have all the information, but can’t see the actual picture." That's about how it is for me: When someone tells me to close my eyes and picture a tiger's face or a pair of jeans or a maple leaf or a pencil, I do not see those things, but I somehow know that I'm imagining them. It's hard to describe the experience. And I just sort of assumed that's how it was for everyone.
Some people who have aphantasia also have trouble with their memory, but I've always had an excellent memory—friends and family are forever saying, "Let's ask Karen—she remembers everything." I also learned that people with aphantasia tend to have a higher than average IQ, which I do have. I've seen elsewhere that there may be a link between aphantasia and autism, which I do not have. Some people with aphantasia are reportedly less affected by scary stories since they can't visualize them, but I definitely scare easy! So there's a whole lot they don't know. And apparently there are degrees of aphantasia; a quiz called the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) has you try to visualize various scenarios and rate them on a scale from 1 to 5:
- No image at all, I only “know” I am thinking of the object
- Dim and vague image
- Moderately realistic and vivid
- Realistic and reasonably vivid
- Perfectly realistic, as vivid as real seeing
I didn't even bother finishing since I scored a "1" (or possibly a "2") on everything.
If you are interested, there's an informative and not-too-long article over at Scientific American about aphantasia, which had been described as early as 1880 but didn't really come to the attention of neurological researchers until 2003.
Do any of you have aphantasia, or maybe someone you know?
P.S. Update about an hour later: Animated conversations are going on over on Facebook and Twitter and via email and in private chat groups about this post! Quite a few people I know are discovering that they too have some degree of aphantasia. I'm starting to think that my atrocious sense of direction might be related…
Leave a Reply