Aphantasia - The First Days after learning it affects you

1 min readByJosh Camden

The very first day i learned that imagination for most people included a small movie theater in their heads, i went online looking for ANYTHING to tell me more about a typical person's experience. But i found nothing, only stories of Aphantasia. Do people really see stuff in their heads? When they say a song was stuck in their head, they actually meant it? With the exception of this website and perhaps some scientific papers, i found nothing. Even spell check tells me Aphantasia isn't spelled correctly.

Thank you for this website. Without it, i don't know what i would have done.

I heard this a few years back, but don't recall where. If aliens were controlling us; what do you think is more likely: the aliens are controlling "you" who are hearing and seeing things in your head, or “me” who doesn't. LOL

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Neal White•recently

I have extreme aphantasia. Everything is black when I close my eyes. The only sense that I can realistically imagine is sound, and yes, I do "hear" a song "stuck in my head". The name for that is an "earworm". My wife has hyperphantasia. When she imagines something, she is fully there. Sights, sounds, smells, touch. She says it's as real as real life. When she needs to spell a word, she apparently actually sees the letters floating in front of her open eyes. When I said that I don't see that, she said, "How can you spell?", with some alarm in her voice. She also doesn't understand how I can remember visual images, if I can't see them. I think I store memories as linked concepts. For example, I can clearly remember the house I grew up in: Two stories, red bricks, dark green shutters, white trim, etc. even though I can't actually see anything in my "mind's eye". Sometimes she says she sometimes wishes she had aphantasia too, because when she remembers something bad from her life (usually in dreams), she relives those traumatic events as if she is really there.