I'm over 30 and just realizing most people can "recall" and "imagine" sensations, how about feelings and emotions?, I can remember events and situation, some with much detail, but just as I can't "see" the memory I can't "feel" the emotion either, I can remember how I felt but as if I was asking other person to describe them to me, just like with visual information, I "know" how a rotated object would look like but I can't see it and I can remember how I felt but I can't feel it. Which for the most part is great, I'm not able to hold grudges, well I can but it's not emotional is more an intellectual effort to act mad, but is very tiresome and can't do it for long, and if I'm not actually mad usually I just let it go. I would like to know if happens to everyone or if is just some unrelated "weirdness" (to me weird is a compliment by the way), somehow the aphantasia I just discovered doesn't bother me at all, somehow I feel it has helped me, not sure how, but feels that way. Maybe related is also the fact that I've never been fixated in the past and I don't think I've felt much regret, I know I've messed up and I actively try to avoid it but is not an emotional thing, not strong at least.

Emotions and aphantasia

February 25, 20202 min readByRoberto Rojas

Emotion

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Amit Khanna•recently•edited

Hello and thanks for responding to me, but I do not know how to respond to a response (there is no reply to Roberto Rojas" arrow below your most recent response), so apologies if this is not the correct way. That is an very interesting point about perceived callousness. That is exactly the dissonance I am struggling with, and had not made any connection to the aphantasia I have been aware of of decades (although I only started using the term more recently).

Roberto Rojas•recently•edited

yea, and happens that sometimes I get more emotional with a movie that I'm watching right now, than with a past event, which is also confounding to others. Which has the plus-side that resentment is very difficult for me and if you want to keep being mad at someone you have to make the conscious effort to not let go, and is very draining, so usually you just let go and the anger pass quickly. The peril of that is that you have to be aware of that and make the mental note or you may fall many times in the same mistake. Not much aftertaste as warning for the next time.

Amit Khanna•recently•edited

This is my first day on this forum, and as I have written elsewhere, I feel like I am finally reading experiences i can connect to. What you describe is my emotional response in every way ...I neither feel the negative nor the positive for that long. Did not connect it to aphantasia, but reading https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2021.0267 and other posts has made me reconsider my entire emotional response range (quite limited according to my wife and son)

Roberto Rojas•recently•edited

and the tricky part. communication wise, is the last part of your comment, because the limitation is not necessarily about the emotional range or deepness, just recalling. The fact that some past event doesn't trigger an emotion now, doesn't mean that the same now wouldn't or that didn't in the first event. Because, apparently, for other people there is a strong emotional bond between past and present, when we lack this "connection" a callousness is assumed and people can act accordingly. Which can hurt the "present us" XD. Just as the miscommunication with the "imaginary" this can be hard to explain. Until I got aware of this I had an internal dissonance between the callousness other saw in me (and I believed) and what I felt in the moment taking it like a "strange event" not a part of myself

Phedre Parks•recently•edited

I definitely relate to your sense of being able to know how I once felt in the moment, but in recollection the situation is more like someone else's story. I do not physically experience past emotions from memory, and this is a highly unusual in regards to most people's experience. I am in a study group now that focuses a lot on Buddhist theories, such as living in the moment. The entire group goes on and on about how so many things trigger emotional and physical responses to past traumas and I am at a loss to understand. I have had trauma in my life, but when I recall it, it is like reading a story in the newspaper. I do not suffer the sensations that most people suffer when their memories are triggered. So, in way, it seems as if those of us with multi-sensory aphantasia have what others are desperately seeking.

Christina Karlhoff•recently•edited

I understand what you mean. Intellectualizing one's feeling seems practical. There may be some correlation between those with aphantastic wiring and the regulation of emotional outlet. To what extent...on that i am reluctant to speculate. On an individual level, we are all fingerprints. I am unable to recall very much from my childhood. I barley remember high school, turning 21, and i'd be lucky to recognize someone from my distant past if i ran into them decades later. I know i had good experiences on family vacations as a young kid, but i can only think about the locations where we would go, no details or feeling memories. On the contrary, i realize that the emotions behind painful experiences can emerge with certain actions as a trigger. I choose to think about living through dark times with detatchment, yet i am susceptible to reacting emotionally if the situation involves any type of discomfort. At the same time, some part of me allows the choice between feeling and numbness. Unfortunately, it has been easier to recall those times when i chose to feel the whole gamut of emotions associated with low vibration (fear, anger, rage, embarassment, sadness, etc.) For me, the emotional outlet is a firehose with two controls - on or off. For example, at my Dad's funeral: I generally recall that i had a difficult time with feeling that day - it was a strain to experience any type of grief, even though it was the exact setting in which grief was expected to be processed. I had to force myself to feel anything. Contrast that with when our family pet passed away - i had to take 3 days off from work because i was so sickened with grief. This demonstrates to me that i am a human being capable of experiencing feeling, and also naturally adept at detaching emotion from thought afterward. It's hard to describe without using words like observer or witness - but it's like being a movie critic or a book critic. I am able to see the world through my eyes; and after watching the film or reading the chapters i could sit down at a desk and write an essay about what i noticed and experienced with my other phyiscal senses; the writing's level of detail would depend upon the level of interest i had in the movie or book. I see, hear, smell, taste, touch and feel in the moment, and analyze when the experience is over. According to neuroscientist Dr. Joe Dispenza, memory without the emotional charge is called wisdom.