Highly sensitive Person with Aphantasia

I have aphantasia. I am also a highly sensitive person with traits validated by Elaine Aron's research. One of these traits is sensory processing sensitivity. I am sensitive to pain, sound, smell, lights, touch, temperature, etc. As a young woman, I excelled in mathematics, enjoying the experience as a way of distancing myself from a turbulent emotional environment. I have good spatial skills and have experienced aphantasia most of my life. When focusing on research, I am less distracted by externals, but when my mind is free, I am aware of named distractions. Recently I read that "Aphantasics experience lower levels of sensory sensitivity, overwhelm from “sensory inputs that might be bright lights, loud noises, or the smell of perfume,” says Carla Dance, a doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex in the U.K." I was puzzled by this finding and so would like to put this question out to the community. Does anyone in the community with aphantasia also experience sensory processing sensitivity or identify as a HSP. To clarify, sensory processing sensitivity differs from sensory processing disorder. Thank you for your response to this inquiry.

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Juan Pablo Fierro•recently

I just discovered I might have extreme aphantasia, and your post resonated because I’ve had almost the opposite experience of what some studies and videos I’ve been looking at suggest. What surprised me with this discovery wasn’t the lack of 'mental imagery', as I always assumed everyone thought the way I do, but how often aphantasia is described as being linked to reduced sensory or emotional sensitivity. For me it’s the opposite. I feel deeply connected to external sensory experience (spaces, materials, textures, sound, light) and I even relate more to being an empath (social and political issues affect me deeply). If anything, I suspect I’m more sensitive to the outside precisely because I cannot summon it internally at will. I don’t retain images, but I feel the world intensely as I encounter it. My work (I’m a designer, architect, photographer and woodworker) depends on that sensitivity on perceiving form, proportion, atmosphere, light and material presence in real time. So I was also puzzled, even a bit offended, by claims that aphantasia correlates with reduced sensory and emotional sensitivity. Maybe these findings say as much about the vantage point of the observer as about the phenomenon itself. Scientists who don’t have aphantasia are necessarily observing it from the outside, and their perspective naturally limits what they can understand or detect. Your experience, and mine, suggest that this relationship is much more complex. I’m curious to hear how others experience this. Thank you for opening the conversation.