How did you first discover aphantasia?

I didn't discover I had aphantasia until I was 65. I was reading a piece online by Blake Ross, who's the co-creating the Mozilla Firefox, where he was describing a condition he has called aphantasia. I had never heard of it but as he described it I realized that's me! For the first time I was able to start connecting the dots as to why I felt different from others. Why for example when I meet a familiar face out of context, I'm scrambling to come up with their name or where I know them from, something others seem to do so easily. My autobiographical memory is terrible, and I always wondered why others like my wife could recall the past in vivid detail as if they could go back in time and "see" a memory. I started researching aphantasia further and feel I finally have some answers as to why I think differently. With this better understanding, I'm now on a journey of experimentation with tools to support my memory and learning, including developing a Personal Knowledge and Information Management (PKIM) application customized to my needs.

An Introduction Hello I’m Eric. I am 45 and hail from Southern California near the US/Mexico border. I have a Bachelor’s in Food Science from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Majority of my work experience is in Agriculture, Construction and commercial food production. My main hobby is modifying cars. I received an ADHD diagnosis in 1990. I received an Autism diagnosis in 2018. My introduction to Aphantasia was the book Autistic Thinking by Dr Alondra Rogers which I read in 2024. I thought that a Nebulous Void was an accurate description of my experience. I also strongly suspect I have dyscalculia after doing more research as I have difficulty getting lost in math problems. Nice to meet everyone.

I'm 49 Years old from Sydney Australia. I work as a professional Photographer & Videographer (surprise). Last week I was meditating and the instructor on my App said "Imagine a Re Rose in full detail, the petals the different hues of red, etc." And then went on to say "really imagine it like you can actually see it in front of your eyes. Like you can touch it." And I thought surely this is a joke. No one can do that. You don't actually see things when you imagine something. You grasp the concept and have an understanding of it but actually visualising. No way. So I asked family and friends and all of them said that yes they could actually visualise when prompted to imagine a Rose, All of them in varying degrees. Then I described what I am experiencing to AI and asked what's wrong with me and that's how I landed here... Still stumped, but I am slowly wrapping my head around it. A lot of my life and my choices in life make a lot more sense now. Like why I was drawn so much to photography. I'm not really grieving, just absolutely fascinated by it all. I wonder if there are any traits that Aphantasts have in common. Thank you so much for this website, it is a massive help for me in navigating my way through this.

A few weeks ago at a small family gathering, my son asked us to close our eyes and picture an apple. The group responded with descriptions of colors, light and dark, details. I had no idea what they were talking about. I'm 77.?error=INVALID_TOKEN

A few weeks ago at a small family gathering, my son asked us to close our eyes and picture an apple. The group responded with descriptions of colors, light and dark, details. I had no idea what they were talking about. I'm 77.

There are two points in my life i could pull up equally here, so i'll do just that. First, when i was a child, my parents took me to a hypnotist, i dont remember what they tried to achieve, but i remember one thing: the hypnotist told me to visualize a red ball rolling up a hill, i asked her «What do i do if i cant see the ball?». However this wasnt really the awakening, as i didnt think much of it afterwards. The second one was when discussing imagination with some people on discord, i was already aware of the word aphantasia, and said that i had it, but thats the first time i realized how most people think, they said they could literally, not figuratively, see everything they thought of as like another layer of reality. Thats the first time i heard what people mean by visualization, it sounded like a superpower to me honestly, i still cant believe it is THE NORM! Hallucinating at will? How?! The weirdest part of my experience, to me at least, is that i can make complex «images» full of detail, both abstract and not, then manipulate them like a god, but i am not able to see these things myself? I can make a guy kick the sun out of the sky, but i am not allowed to see it? Its honestly a bit unfair. Most of my thoughts are what others would call an inner voice (just without a single sound), my thoughts often consist of words, but i can freely switch between the invisible images and the soundless words, its weird, very weird.

I didn’t really thinking or know about it until my wife and I were talking about reading and I said I struggle with staying with a book. I didn’t know why until she asked me about the visuals in my mind, and I said what do you mean…..she said don’t you see what you’re reading in your mind? I didn’t know that’s how you read a book. I didn’t even realize that you pictured the story. To me it was always just words, and I’ve always struggled with finishing books. She’s a big reader and I wanted to do something with her and we just kind of stumbled on it.

I didn’t know I had aphantasia until early 2025. I was listening to a CBC program, half-paying attention, when the host invited listeners to imagine an apple. I paused and tried. Nothing appeared. No colour, no shape, no suggestion of an image. I tried again, then with other familiar things, but there was still nothing. Just awareness without a picture.When I told my husband, he was genuinely startled. He couldn’t believe I didn’t see anything at all. I, in turn, couldn’t believe that he did. He described images in full detail, even colours that seemed to accompany certain sounds. I remember thinking that he must be speaking metaphorically. Surely people didn’t actually see things in their minds.I called my daughter. She was in her forties and, as it turned out, just like me. She couldn’t picture anything either. When she realized that others truly could, anger surfaced, anger at something unnamed, unrecognized, and therefore unmourned. I felt it too. All those years of being told, “Why don’t you remember that?” or “Didn’t you see it?” We had taken those words at face value, assuming they were figures of speech. We said that ourselves, I can picture that, I see what you mean, never suspecting that other people meant it literally.When my daughter’s husband learned this, he paused and said, “Oh. That explains a lot.” My husband began noticing small things as well. He saw how I sometimes hesitate before opening a cupboard, or reach into the one beside it before finding what I want. It’s a fleeting misstep, I quickly adjust, but I don’t have an internal picture guiding me to the right place. I’ve always thought of it as a quirk, nothing more.There are moments when I feel a quiet resentment at the advantage others seem to have. But more often, I notice what my daughter and I don’t carry. We don’t replay scenes from the past. We don’t relive arguments in sharp detail. We don’t sit with old hurts, revisiting them again and again. We rarely stay angry for more than a few minutes. Our inner worlds are calm, unburdened by images that linger or intrude.I’m beginning to understand that vivid mental imagery can be both a gift and a weight. It can haunt as much as it delights. We may not be able to summon palm trees on an ocean beach, but neither do we re-experience cruelty or loss in graphic detail. We know what those images are, we just don’t see them. And in that absence, there is a kind of peace I hadn’t understood until now.

I've always had Aphantasia.I was so frustrated when I was young because I would try to explain that I didn't see pictures when I closed my eyes, and I was told I was wrong. That of course I did. I was asked if I dreamed. And yes I have vivid dreams in color. But then I would be told if I closed my eyes I'd see the same types of images as my dreams. When I said that wasn't so, they would reiterate that something I was experiencing wasn't true- it messed with my self esteem and my own self-validations.I never daydreamed. I can't daydream because I can't picture the process of what those daydreams would be. Again I was told that of course I had day dreams- again another truth I was living being told it wasn't so. I can't just sit and listen to music. I can sing and I can dance along with music, but just sitting there listening to music is incredibly boring to me.In talking with friends they visualize and daydream when they listen to music. My self esteem when it comes to my looks ( American woman- oy vay!) is always based on how I feel not on how I look , I think that is because there isn't some perfect image of myself in my minds eye...as I don't have a minds eye." When I feel good I look in a mirror and see a pretty lady and when i feel bad I look in the mirror and see an ugly/fat/whatever gal. When it comes to members of the opposite sex their looks mean very little as I can't really remember what they look like. I used to have a friend in my teens who hated that I could never tell her the eye color of the latest crush I had. I also have a dear friend from my youth who is a fashion designer and it drives him nuts that I never remember any outfits unless it was something we took a picture of.When things were difficult someone suggested meditation and the amount I hated it surprised everyone who knew me. I believe now that seeing thing in your minds eye is a necessary part of the meditative process. One that I am woefully unable to do. It was suggested over and over and until I knew the word and definition and reality of aphantasia.As we devolve into turbulent times I find the lack of truth clicks into the sense of reality, or lack thereof that I had growing up with this. It's being told over and over that something that is happening to you , cannot be happening to you that really messed with my head in this journey.

There was a Facebook post a few years back by a Silicon Valley software engineer who described aphantasia and how it blew him away to discover it. My wife actually sent that post to me with the line "Read that .. I think that is you. " ... my mind was blown. All of a sudden my life started making sense. Why i was useless when my wife sent me to the store to get paint in the color of our living room. Why i can watch horror movies all day long and not get nightmares. Why i settled on an entirely black wardrobe years ago. Why i was never able to create cool looking slide decks at work. Why, even though I'm an absolute cinephile, i found it impossible to imagine a movie of my own. It was a revelation.

I always had this, it was just completely normal for me and I never really thought about it. But I at the same time always had many issues with visual memory, remembering people by faces, in arts class, with describing places and things from memory. I never really had any kind of visual memory or memory of things that was experienced more or less visual only. Yes, I remember my school days, but only a few things that I have a strong emotional or acoustic connection with are really present in my mind (but not at all with any kind of visual representation, but I can play back the connected emotions or acoustic part and the information about the connected experience (without visual info) just fine. I never understood when people talked about the inner eye or when I someone said that they can picture it in their mind, for me it was always only a figure of speech and that was it for me, just something that people say. My non-existing visual memory I had put done as that, as a bad memory, as something that I just had. "Oh, I am just bad with faces and I don't care about most what I see all day so my brain filters it out. Nothing strange at all" That went this way until I was about 40, so 4 maybe 6 year ago, when on some of the many RSS feeds that I am subscribed to a article was published about aphantasia. The article was describing me, was describing how my mind, my memory worked and I was completely blown away. After that I started to read as many articles and publications about it as I could find. I had a name for how my mind was, how I was and I had published articles and even peer reviewed scientific papers as proof that it was real and something other people was experiencing too. That I am able to say "Oh, that I can't because I have aphantasia" is often such a relief, because it is no longer a "you don't try hard enough" but a "that is how my brain works, here read those papers if you don't belief me". It is no longer my "fault" but just how the combination of genes (or whatever factor else responsible for it) made me.

I was talking via Discord to a co-worker in Ireland and she mentioned she had aphantasia and had just discovered that another coworker was also aphantic (is that the right word?) When I asked what it was, she explained it and it was like a truck hit me because I had the same experience. Apparently, however, I'm hypophantasia as I can occasionally see vague, fuzzy images of very familiar things. I suffered a closed head injury when I was 20, so I'm wondering if it goes back to that or if I was always this way.

About a decade ago, my daughter said to me, "Hey! There's a term for what's wrong with you! It's aphantasia." Prior to that, I just thought I was the only person who can't see pictures in the mind.

I do not think I ever really thought about the issue in these terms; since I am already neurodivergent in other ways, I just assumed that this might be part of it, or that it was the same for other people, or something like that. I think I only realised it when I first read about aphantasia as a newly defined symptom on BBC or some other mainstream media outlet. I _had_ previously heard about the fact that some people have an inner voice and some don't – “(an)endophasia” if you wan to look it up –, but never extended that to images. For the record, I _do_ have an internal monologue – is there any data on correlation between (an)eendophasia and aphantasia?

Until last year, I was convinced everyone was lying when they were saying that they could picture things in their minds (for example in primary school when we would do relaxation exercises asking us to ''picture ourselves on a beach'' and the likes). I never once thought I was the one that was different. It is also quite strange, because I consider myself to be a very imaginative person - I love to write, I played-pretend a lot when I was a kid, I had lots of ''imaginary friends'' that I actually could not see (now I wonder if my friends who also had those were able to see them or not), etc. In recent years, I started reading a lot of fantasy, which is probably my favorite hobby at the moment. I cannot picture anything at all when I read (or in general, my score is 16), and I absolutely need music to feel immerse in the world I am reading about. Last year, I saw an Instagram video of a person saying how amazing it is to read and to picture everything you see on the page, then it was pictures of fanart from some books. Someone commented that it sounds lovely, but some people cannot picture anything in their heads. I looked through the comments and realized that most people did not understand how not being to picture things was possible. And then, I knew. I googled. I asked my friends and family to answer this question I had taken for granted with the upmost sincerity. I realized I had lived in a bubble, and then I got very sad. Some people can see things? They can picture someone's face, relive memories in their heads (I narrate them), even hear someone's voice? They see movies in their heads when they read? I can't. It felt like I was grieving. I kept thinking that when the people I love ultimately leave this world, I would forget them. I won't be able to see their faces in my head or hear their voice, I won't be able to picture how they walked or acted. It broke my heart. At the same time, it also made me understand why I am so terrible at remembering faces or people I've met. I've always felt so guilty when someone would come up to me with a smile, say my name, and I would just stay there awkwardly. Or why I often can't follow the plot of movies\series with lots of characters - they all look the same, it takes me ages to finally be able to tell them apart. The only positive thing about this, so far, is that I seem to be able to forget people I want to forget with great ease. I was discussing with a close friend who recently went through a break up, she said it was horrible because she kept having all these ''movies'' of beautiful memories with her ex. She couldn't control them, and it made the break up much harder for her to go through. I never had to deal with this, breakups are awful, but they never were that bad to handle. Trying to see the positive in all this...

I started this comment on my phone 12 days ago, but my phone and this web site do not play well together. Hopefully my computer works better. I have read a lot of the comments on this site. I am amazed at the depth and variety of people's experiences with aphantasia. I end up with a lot of questions. It seems to me that people have many different experiences of aphantasia which makes me wonder if aphantasia is just a symptom of something more profound. I find many comments that I resonate with strongly. Others are completely outside my experience. Is aphantasia related to personality type? Before I found out that I have internal experiences different from most people, I attributed being "different" to testing as INTP on the Meyers-Briggs - another low probability state. I want to know much more about aphantasia and "abstract" thinking. Of the people I know that are aphantasic, the abstract thinking is the thing I most associate with them. Another question that comes to mind, the people I know with aphantasia are able to accept uncertainty and deal with it. Is it just random or is it related? As for me, to add my experiences to the discussion. Although I didn't know the word until I read The New Yorker magazine article, I had many indications that something was different. The usual "problems" - face recognition, memory, autobiographical details, being mystified when a meditation leader says to visualize my face, thinking the third eye was a metaphor even when it should have been obvious that people were actually seeing something... On the other hand, long before Oracle solved our data structure problems, it was clear to me that I "saw" how to create, manipulate, and solve problems with data structures better than even most of my nerdy peers. Likewise, I can "visualize" a network. From the late 70's I have never been able to understand how anyone could doubt the reality of climate change. I can "visualize" the little packet of energy heading out to space, being captured by an atom, and that little packet does not make it to space. I understand that measurements show that we are increasing those atoms of carbon in the atmosphere. I understand the calculations that show that this amount of carbon causes more energy to be retained on earth than the energy change that caused the ice ages. I "see" all of this so clearly that it seemed impossible that we wouldn't fix it. Now I understand many people don't "see" that way. They literally, not metaphorically "see". Likewise evolution makes sense in the same way. I took an Iyengar Yoga class twice a week for 18 years or so. I can remember the names of a couple poses. I should be able to remember all of them after all that. But I can remember how to get in and out of the poses. I think in sentences, but it is not like hearing. I volunteer in a prairie project. Some of my peers remember the scientific names of dozens and dozens of plants. I am lucky to remember the common names of a few. But "seeing" the prairie outside of the immediate sensation of physically looking at it, I think I "see" it differently than most of them do. I think of it more as the concept of a prairie with all that entails rather than the picture of the prairie. I used to play bridge occasionally. At the beginning of a hand I would think it through. More than once, I had my strategy. Problem solved. My mind goes on to something else, and it comes time to actually play the cards. The strategy was gone. Either try to recreate it on the spot, or just play something, anything. One more anecdote. I am part of a book group of over 50 years. With most of the group present on New Years Eve, I asked people to visualize the apple. It turns out 6 out of 10 of us can't see the apple or anything else at all. One is superphantasic and we all want to be on her team playing Trivial Pursuit. I was not surprised at any of the results. It makes for interesting book discussions. Lots of personal experiences, theories, concepts. Much different that other book discussions I have been in. I see that some people here think of aphantasia as a problem or a deficiency. I don't think of it at all that way. It's just a different way of being. Our differences come in many dimensions, some of which we know and probably others of which we have no clue. I would not trade what I have for the ability to see images. On

Hi Tom and the group! I found out when I recently received an email from Ted Talks about the subject. I had no idea there was a name for it, or that there were others like me. Made me feel some relief! I'm not sure how I acquired mine, but I read a TBI can be one cause. My TBI was at the age of two, so I can't say whether that was the cause or not since I obviously wasn't aware until I was at the age of "imagination" and verbal skills. That's when I started noticing I wasn't like everyone else. It did make some things in life difficult and frustrating for me, like when you are asked to use "minds eye" (like group meditation). I am taking my own family polling, so far my daughter and SIL's internal eye work fine. More polling and research to do ;)

Last year when I needed an "emergency" shower replacement at home, the crew used industrial strength acetone for a few hours. I had doors and windows wide open and all fans blowing during and after their work. After I went to sleep that night, I had amazingly colorful dreams and as I was waking up I called up various mental images I could zoom in and out of, change the colors, change the borders between the colors, change the focus of various parts of the image...all the things I'd ever done with cameras, film, computer graphics, drawing, and art, BUT WITH/IN MY MIND!!! When I got up I went directly to the computer and typed a version of what just happened and that's when I learned about phantasia/aphantasia. As I've read about aphantasia, I also realized why my decades-long efforts to develop my musical "inner ear" lead to nearly no results. If I really focused hard and have no distractions, I can often (but not consistently) hear a couple of patterns I've worked really hard to audiate--the patterns are very basic (tonic and dominant arpeggiated chords), but they aren't stable enough to build on.

I've always described my memory as a series of photographs rather than video. When I told a friend that recently, he said: "oh, you have aphantasia." It was nice to be able to identify my condition and to learn that I'm among ~4% of the population. It was also nice to hear about the related benefits, including higher tendency towards rational thinking and mindfulness. At the same time, it was heartbreaking to realize that I'm in the small minority that have essentially lost their past insofar as not being able to relive it.

Recently after studying mathematics over long periods of time I discovered I can manipulate geometry in my head. I can fold, distort, layer, etc to the geometry, space, and perspective in my visualization. This is all done while maintaining topology. After training this skill I have been able to create higher-dimensional projections of geometry and physics visualizations. So I discovered aphantasia when I discovered I had the opposite of it around 4 months ago.