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Whether Aphantasia Is exclusively visual.

I’m pretty sure based on previous conversations, that Aphantasia is the inability to recall all senses, like sight,  taste, touch, sound, etc. But this website’s description (and thus what shows up if you look it up on google) says its excursively visual or at least fails to mention it can affect the ability to recall any other sense. To be fair most info on Aphantasia focuses exclusively on visuals, I just want to make sure the description of Aphantasia that most people will see is accurate as the current description here doesn’t fully include people like myself who can’t create any or at lease many senses, including but not limited to sight. I would like to know other more qualified peoples thoughts on this though.

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Total Comments (4)
Jennifer McDougall
on March 13, 2023

Hello Ryqer, 

Aphantasia can impact the other imagery senses, but most experience visual aphantasia with varying degrees of imagery abilities in the other senses.

Current estimates are that ~26% of aphants will experience multisensory or what some refer to as “total aphantasia” in all senses (according to a 2020 study led by Pearson et al).

Much less is known scientifically about the other sense modalities and their impacts, even for those with mental imagery. Visual imagery seems to dominate the scientific understanding/literature, but this is starting to change. The Network is actively working on a new assessment and discovery place for identifying multisensory aphantasia and all imagery sub-types, Imagination Spectrum. The platform is still in beta, and to see preliminary results, there’s a small fee to help support its future development. The project is completely unfunded.

You can also search using the tag “multisensory” to find other discussions, articles and research exploring this very topic. Here’s a link to one of my favourite articles written by Silicon techie Steven Levithan: 3 Things I Learned About Multisensory Aphantasia That Changed My Understanding of the World. 

Danny Solis
on March 22, 2023

Having it, and working on making people aware since I was young, was difficult, as never had the words to advise people about it. 

I also cannot recall physical touch, smell, taste, or hear inner monolog in my mind. 

Ernst Schmid
on March 22, 2023

Hello Ryqer,
I can only speak for myself. I can’t remember any auditory or visual stimuli, but I can remember all the data I was processing at that moment.
It’s like the black box of an airplane. From the entire flight, it records only a few key processed data.
For example, if I want to remember the name of the person I spoke to some time ago, I recall a situation in which I addressed the person by name.
My own experiments have shown that I have access to all my interpreted/processed stimuli, but not to the raw data.

Danny Solis
on March 22, 2023

Interesting way of putting it. It’s more like conceptual events, personality, how things flowed in events, and mannerisms for me than names. Names are difficult. 

Joe Falk
on July 30, 2023

You are not alone. For myself all senses are affected. Can’t reproduce a song, smell or taste, just in the moment I hear/taste it and the link to the memory is created.
Also emotions are fully affected and not linked to any memorie. I have learned to read the gestures made by others to understand them. It’s like a game and I don’t feel anything recognizing/seeing emotions from others – so I have to play happiness or sadness. In the past a lot of people told me I’m not empathic. It’s pretty difficult to get accepted.