Perhaps for me, there is a little of both handicap and advantage.  Educationally, I was able to do quite well with degrees in science, business, and law.  Some aspects of education were more difficult, but my ability to focus without distraction was quite helpful. Handicaps include very poor ability to remember names and faces of people that I infrequently see and autobiographical memory impairment (probably related). Finding out that my brain works differently has allowed me to not worry so much on how I can remember data points from my education, but I can’t remember a name of someone I met yesterday.

Advantages? All of the above. Other than the Masters. My major advantage (in retrospect) was a lack of education. According to my well educated son, I would not have experienced many facets of mania during a long learning through psychosis. I could locate through triangulated sensations in my face, discover the lost, know which bet to place (temporary). Before I went off the rails of normal life I experienced a powerful dream during which I was guided around a huge round table filled with inscriptions representing all of man's beliefs; that I would be loaned many gifts so I understood the experience but my gift was to translate the ineffable. (Looking back was I labelling myself an oxymoron?) I knew my experiences all had a basis in the electro-magnetic field but I had not the education in physics to explain.  Reading below - seems I have already responded but with less self exposure.  Summing up: the lack of formal education set me on different paths. Arrived wearing Cassandra's shoes.

I am an author. I am often (!) praised by readers for my writing of place. In fact I write in a fairly minimalist style with very little prose that actually describes a place. I tell readers to go back and add up all the pages that have descriptions on them and say that if they stick them all together they'll find there's really not much there. However maybe it works because I work hard to get readers to imagine a place by choosing very specific details. I've thought about this a lot because I didn't realise I was aphantasic until about half way through my writing career. Now I wonder if it helped me define my writing style in an accidental way. I wonder if my inability to call up images helped me with this. Readers have to make pictures in their minds because I don't.  I've always thought that is the trick to realism as a style. You don't see what's going on inside other people's heads; you just have the phenomenological evidence – what they say, how they look. But from that evidence, the reader intuits the deeper layer of what they're thinking. Maybe that's why I'm drawn to it.  Writing place is a little similar. If you fill the page with description, you actually crowd out the readers' imagination. 

This sounds like you’re trying to spin this into a feeling of superiority, just in the way you’ve worded things. Specifically your section of being more in the moment and the section dealing in fantasy. Without fantasy in some regard, progress would never be made. While not able to visually fantasize you specifically mention fantasies that for some reason you think other people would be having during a conversation. Unless you’ve developed some BioTech that allows you to experience someone else’s thought process, logically you make the association because you have done so yourself. You claim you could never do such a thing because of how your brain works, then how is it you could imagine that’s how others think? Aphantasia is neither a strength or weakness, it’s a state of function for our brain which is our sole way of experiencing the universe around us. 

All of the above to which I add: Abstract thinking with the ability to take on big ideas, join unseen dots, conceptual leaps. 

I resonated with a lot of your points, and really needed to hear that. Thanks. 

Perhaps for me, there is a little of both handicap and advantage.  Educationally, I was able to do quite well with degrees in science, business, and law.  Some aspects of education were more difficult, but my ability to focus without distraction was quite helpful. Handicaps include very poor ability to remember names and faces of people that I infrequently see and autobiographical memory impairment (probably related). Finding out that my brain works differently has allowed me to not worry so much on how I can remember data points from my education, but I can’t remember a name of someone I met yesterday.

Advantages? All of the above. Other than the Masters. My major advantage (in retrospect) was a lack of education. According to my well educated son, I would not have experienced many facets of mania during a long learning through psychosis. I could locate through triangulated sensations in my face, discover the lost, know which bet to place (temporary). Before I went off the rails of normal life I experienced a powerful dream during which I was guided around a huge round table filled with inscriptions representing all of man's beliefs; that I would be loaned many gifts so I understood the experience but my gift was to translate the ineffable. (Looking back was I labelling myself an oxymoron?) I knew my experiences all had a basis in the electro-magnetic field but I had not the education in physics to explain.  Reading below - seems I have already responded but with less self exposure.  Summing up: the lack of formal education set me on different paths. Arrived wearing Cassandra's shoes.

I am an author. I am often (!) praised by readers for my writing of place. In fact I write in a fairly minimalist style with very little prose that actually describes a place. I tell readers to go back and add up all the pages that have descriptions on them and say that if they stick them all together they'll find there's really not much there. However maybe it works because I work hard to get readers to imagine a place by choosing very specific details. I've thought about this a lot because I didn't realise I was aphantasic until about half way through my writing career. Now I wonder if it helped me define my writing style in an accidental way. I wonder if my inability to call up images helped me with this. Readers have to make pictures in their minds because I don't.  I've always thought that is the trick to realism as a style. You don't see what's going on inside other people's heads; you just have the phenomenological evidence – what they say, how they look. But from that evidence, the reader intuits the deeper layer of what they're thinking. Maybe that's why I'm drawn to it.  Writing place is a little similar. If you fill the page with description, you actually crowd out the readers' imagination. 

This sounds like you’re trying to spin this into a feeling of superiority, just in the way you’ve worded things. Specifically your section of being more in the moment and the section dealing in fantasy. Without fantasy in some regard, progress would never be made. While not able to visually fantasize you specifically mention fantasies that for some reason you think other people would be having during a conversation. Unless you’ve developed some BioTech that allows you to experience someone else’s thought process, logically you make the association because you have done so yourself. You claim you could never do such a thing because of how your brain works, then how is it you could imagine that’s how others think? Aphantasia is neither a strength or weakness, it’s a state of function for our brain which is our sole way of experiencing the universe around us. 

All of the above to which I add: Abstract thinking with the ability to take on big ideas, join unseen dots, conceptual leaps. 

I resonated with a lot of your points, and really needed to hear that. Thanks.