Think about your breakfast this morning. Can you imagine the pattern on your coffee mug? The sheen of the jam on your half-eaten toast?
Most of us can call up such pictures in our minds. We can visualize the past and summon images of the future. But for an estimated 4% of people, this mental imagery is weak or absent. When researchers ask them to imagine something familiar, they might have a concept of what it is, and words and associations might come to mind, but they describe their mind’s eye as dark or even blank.
… the topic received a surge of attention when, a decade ago, an influential paper coined the term aphantasia to describe the experience of people with no mental imagery.
Much of the early work sought to describe the trait and assess how it affected behaviour. But over the past five years, studies have begun to explore what’s different about the brains of people with this form of inner life. The findings have led to a flurry of discussions about how mental imagery forms, what it is good for and what it might reveal about the puzzle of consciousness: researchers tend to define mental imagery as a conscious experience, and some are now excited to study aphantasia as a way to probe imagery’s potentially unconscious forms.
The article itself went into a lot of past and current research into aphantasia and is quite detailed, worth a read if you are interested (especially if you are also quite high on the aphantasia scale like OP)
Try this archive.org link if it is paywalled
Edit: some of you all should take the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVID). The article only gave an excerpt, there seem to be a few free ones floating on the internet
I agree mine is like a mental collage sometimes organised sometimes not. It’s like the images do not stop. I relay mental on image more than any other sensory input. They help, they combine and support the images but I generally feel like I have picture and video loops playing in my brain non stop….even dreaming when I sleep.
Seeing comments like this makes me question myself. I don’t experience this at all. I can picture things vaugely in my head but they dissapear the moment I’m not thinking about it. My thoughts are more like concepts, unless I want to explicitiy imagine somethng. But even then I woulnd’t say that I can “see” it in the same detail as if I were looking at it with my own two eyes.
I think that’s normal. Like if I look at a blank wall I can actively imagine stuff on it, but it doesn’t just happen automatically all the time.
One time I was out in the woods and I found a spot where I could stand in the sun and it felt nice. So I did that for probably half an hour. No thoughts, just standing in the sun.
That sounds like it might be nice. Peaceful is the first word that comes to mind. I almost always have a lot of vivid sounds, pictures, shapes, textures, movements, even smells in my head. I can turn it off sometimes, but it’s work. I don’t think I’d give it up, but it can be a little overwhelming sometimes and often makes me feel like an odd duck.
I always assumed that this was how everyone function, until I became an adult. It was clear to me early on in my adulthood that I was very visual and spacial. Some people see a white wall and see nothing, I see texture, a frame, I can see how objects can be (mentally) situated and rearranged. Problem is it never stops. It’s like having instagram, YouTube and Netflix running in my head 24/7.
I am the same way, it is a constant slideshow of vivid images, videos loops, complex shapes and colors projected into my vision. Whatever I am thinking about has these associations, like my brain works on complex hieroglyphs and not words. Which seems to be backed up by science as neurological studies into language processing show that metaphorical image/sensory association happens before language processing within our brains. Language is a translation layer after all the sensory input.
I thought everyone was like this until my preteens when I would reference some aspect of it to others and get weird looks back.
Yeh thats pretty understandable, to others its hard to explain how not only is it all running but your brain is also processing all the associations with these images and video, along with mental leaps to other images/and sensors for no logical reason. The closest i can describe it to is 6 movies all on, running at triple speed. Some are logical and in sequence, some are surreal and some are stopping and freezing. They all in different visual effects. And intermingled like you say is everything from words, symbols and colours/shapes.
It is absolutely at a half functioning and half subconscious level and and for me is my primary language. I have to work hard to stop it sometimes.
Brown noise helps me stop random intrusions and provides calm and focus. I use the Star Trek TNG Enterprise D engine noise piped into my earbuds, headphones or home speakers.
I go into a meditative state when it gets really bad, like pushing everything to the side and focus past it all.
I’m 47, I don’t know how old you are but I’ve struggled with this throughout my life along with the other sensory stuff I have (emotion > color, Concept > shape, perceived emotion > color, mirror touch, texture > color/shape and a few other types of synesthesia). I have found that practicing to calm my mind, mute my senses and practice holistic balance in my life has greatly improved my quality of life.
I do not know how debilitating this is for you but it greatly affected my life. Realizing that I cannot stop my mind or isolate myself and live a fulfilling life. I learned to acknowledge these things and live with them as a benefit. The best analogy is that I surf the waves of my thoughts and no longer let the waves crash over me. Or like emotional/mental aikido. Learn to turn it to your advantage and empower you instead of letting it overwhelm you. Figure out triggers, isolate them and understand them.
Anyway, if you struggle with this you are not alone. There aren’t a ton of us out there but there are others. Don’t fight against it but learn to live in balance with it. When I did my life greatly improved. I have skills that no one else has and while people do not know what it comes from they can tell that my insightfulness, pattern recognition, logical decision making, memory and creativity are very different from the usual sort.
Apologies if this comes off as preachy, you may have your thing on lock already but 7 out of 10 times the person who I am discussing this stuff with who has something similar doesn’t. I will always be learning new tricks or hidden features and I am always looking for tips from others I interact with in the wild.
DM me whenever.