How did you first discover aphantasia?

I, like so many others, first learned about aphantasia from the article in the Nov. 3, 2025 New Yorker. I have acquired cognitive deficits due to a traumatic brain injury in 2022. I had very strong non verbal abilities prior to the TBI and now have very limited -almost no- ability to visualize. Interestingly I can visualize my wife of 44 years as a young woman- but struggle to visualize her face now. I am a fully trained and experienced neurologist and it is ironic for me to try to analyze my own deficits through my own experience. But not to focus exclusively on what is lost what I am most fascinated by is what I seemed to have gained. In particular I have discovered enhanced musical abilities. I can’t not hear music. I have been a serious trumpet player growing up and as an adult. Now I can remember a tune, pick up my horn and play it by “ear” as easily as you might whistle a tune from the radio. I’ve also started some improvisational composition. One of my friends who is principal trumpet of our symphony said to me “the challenge is to find the positive in what has happened”. I think this may be it.

I just read an article in The New Yorker dated October 27, 2025 about someone who couldn't visualize pictures, faces or the past. I realized that this described me to a 'T'. I have been researching aphantasia & am so happy to know that there is a reason for my inability to visualize. However, I can visualize numbers . At the same time, I am extremely good at math. Also, I did very well on the MAT test for grad school where I learned I am very good at thinking 'outside of the box'. But I have to write everything down in order to recall info that I want to remember later. I have a lot of folders

I am 65 years-old and just figured out I have Aphantasia. As a trainer I conduct an exercise with groups were I tell the participants, "close your eyes and do not visualize and elephant." I noticed that people's faces have vivid reactions. Everyone says that they can see the elephant. It was their strong facial reactions that led me to believe they were experiencing something that I was not. I have no problem not visualizing the elephant -- I do not see anything. It explains so much. I have an very difficult time remembering faces. I take tons and tons of photos. I have a terrible autobiographical memory. What I recall from my childhood are the stories. Once I have told a story about my past multiple times I remember the story - not the images. I do feel fortunate that I cannot recall the tragic life images that I have witnessed. I can describe what I have seen however I do not see it. I wish I had known all this earlier in my life. Thank you Dr. Zeman.

I read news publications and ran across a survey about aphantasia and was surprised to find I don’t see anything when I close my eyes

I knew for years I had prosopagnosia. Then in one of my groups I learned about the NYer article.

I had been doing a psychic awareness and animal communication course. In order to 'open up' we had to imagine scenes and 'see' animals and colours etc in our minds eye. Try as I might I couldn't see a thing. I was, however, getting "knowing " thoughts and perceptions which proved accurate. I went on to Google and asked why I couldn't see anything and from various forums I learned that I must indeed have Aphantasia. It also appears to be the reason I can 'move on' quite quickly from sorrowful events, like my dear dog passing. Turns out I am not a psychopath after all thankfully !

I discovered a few years ago, and honestly in true aphant fashion, I don't recall exactly. But I'm pretty sure it was around 2015 and I saw an article about the zeman study. It was jarring, but I don't know, kind of in a good way, as I'd been incredibly anxious about the way my memory seemed to have been failing from an early age; now instead of worrying about lack of visualization, I'm learning to embrace it as a sorta abstract mini-superpower kinda thing lol.

I figured out I had aphantasia when my teenager studied it in school and told me she thought I had it. I’m an avid golfer and a lot of the coaching says to visualize the shot, I couldn’t even picture the course let alone the shot I was about to hit! I told my daughter my frustration and she quickly told me about aphantasia and it all fell into place. My daughter also thinks thats why I struggle with art and find reading books boring because I don’t see anything in my mind when I read (she sees a movie in her mind when she reads 🤯).

I saw someone on Facebook Dull Men's Club post about this not too long ago. I asked my sister if she actually sees things in her mind, and I still am astounded that people do. I read online, and discovered this group through the NY article. My memory is excellent, though, better than average. I learn best through spoken words. I think there is visual processing at a less-than-consciously-accessible level. I'm wondering if my loneliness and always feeling like an outsider is related to this. I find it very puzzling

It’s probably no surprise that I don’t remember how I realized, only that it was in the last 2 years. I think I read an article about it. I’m a visual artist who can’t visualize. I simply react to the materials and what’s in front of me. My boys are entering adolescence. Suddenly the previous chapter of our lives together feels lost to me. I have boxes of journals and ephemera. They help to connect me to my previous lives. I see only blackness when I close my eyes- if I strive for more I sometimes see amorphous shapes of a areas of lightness but I think that is from leftover imprints of light on my eye’s “hardware”. When I try to think of people or places, there is something but it’s very vague and stitched together from facts I know. I’d like to learn more about what strengths I have that this condition is related to.

Like many here, the notion of Aphantasia was a complete surprise to me. I'm 59 and learned of it a few days ago via a pod cast. Many subsequent discussions with my wife mainly took the form of "What, really, you *actually* see images in your mind, it is not just a turn of phrase?". "Really, you 'see' a horse?". "No, seriously....all I get is black and some blotches of gray". Then it progressed to "wait, can you actually hear music?". "How about smells....". I have none of the above. Well, bummer. After disbelief passed, I went through "well, maybe I'm just interpreting what I (don't) see wrongly". But as I sometimes wake at 2am with dream images still floating through my head, that *are* actual images not blobby nothingness -- albeit not ones under my control -- I realized that if this is indeed what other see, then yes, I am missing out on a whole waking world of visualization, and other sensory options. Double bummer. My first thought was to let it go and not delve deeper as my life has been pretty good thus far (family, career -- I'm now retired --, etc) without these capabilities. But I keep getting sucked into trying to learn more. I mean, you find out everyone else on the street has a color TV and you just have B&W and well, it irked me. And for a better analogy, everyone else has a color TV and I have a black and white that I can't plug in. And the radio only picks up static to boot.... So I decided to engage a bit more and keep reading the research -- and I really appreciate forums such as this! To see where it takes me. So thank you to Tom and everyone involved. Currently, I'm leaning more towards being fascinated by the insight and hope I can learn and grow from it, although I do admit to being on edge of depressive, or envious, jealous thoughts that I hope I can keep in check.

I visited a college dormitory room where the students who lived there had paper and drawing charcoal on a table and had visitors draw a picture of themselves. They were then posted on a wall of the dorm room. Results ran from amazing likeness to drawings akin to Charlie Brown. My art would have been Charlie Brown by a 10 year old. I noticed that the drawing talent had a wide range and was not a function of study. It was more a talent I did not have, but, judging by the quality of the drawings, there were far more people capable of creating good images of themselves than those, like me, who could not. What I thought was the amazing talent of a few was not a unique, innate skill, but an ability most had and I lacked. I heard a Radiolab about aphantasia and it was the Eureka Moment.

Greetings! How did I first discover aphantasia - well now, today, I discovered aphantasia.com by accident! (Attempts at humour aside), I never realised that I had it. I suspect there are two reasons for this. First of all, I never realised that other people could visually imagine a representation. Second, I thought my difficulty in recognising faces of people I knew and linking their name to the face were simply just that. I was diagnosed as a high functioning autistic person in my late fifties, and found that to explain a lot. It has only been a couple of more recent conversations where the awareness that other people could create a visualisation in their mind and describe it, that raised a suspicion for me. I didn't go looking for aphantasia.com however - rather the website appeared in a search for something quite unrelated that I was researching. As I read, and then tried the examples, I couldn't "see" anything. As I read some other comments, I see some similarities. I have no childhood memories in any "visualisation" I simply can identify that X happened at Y time in my childhood. When I look at photographs, they do not evoke memories as a visualisation of any kind. For instance I look at photographs of my long-dead parents, and it is not linked to emotional affect, but I can affirm that this is them. I'm curious to learn more and probably to discuss this with a neurologist in due course to see what he thinks. And yes, I'm a knowledge hound so I downloaded all the studies on the website to read at leisure. The big insight for me is that I couldn't ever understand why it was that I couldn't draw other than stick persons, although I could create complex tabular diagrams of phenomena linked in categories of features - what I mean here is abstract concepts which had a bunch of specific tagged features - say a company which made widgets, used components purchased from companies in three or four other countries, assembled them in a fifth country and exported them from that country to their various subsidiaries around the world. I "made it up" as a diagram on a white board developed "on the fly" not from a mental visualisation, but linked by abstract tags of some kind, like volume, production or distribution cost etc. At some level, I believe my brain had clearly organised this data in some fashion, but subconsciously. I'd liken it to the way Eric Pazandak talks about his chess playing experience in a comment on today's page. When I read it there was some spark of recognition!! I'm looking forward to finding out more and so I joined this Community.

I just read an article from The New Yorker about aphantasia and found it very insightful. I don't remember a lot from my childhood other than a few snippets here and there (more like black and white pictures). No more than half a dozen significant events and no more than 2 or 3 seconds. I look at pictures from my childhood and know that that happened but can't remember the event. I just know it happened - there's a picture. This explains a lot.

I first became aware that some people might actually "see" what they are talking about when I was 13, and a friend insisted that they could. Others, over time have claimed the same thing, so I've come to think it's probably true. Fifteen years later, a friend who was a chess master, talked me into learning to play chess for a month using the Queen's gambit opening, and playing at his club. I played a guy who had an 1850 rating, (mine was 1500 as a beginner) and got into a complicated situation, where we traded pieces for 17 moves. At the end, I was a pawn up. My friend later asked how I could visualize all of that and if I had a supercomputer for a brain, when I told him I knew exactly what was going to happen, unless my opponent screwed up, which was unlikely. I told him the truth; I could not visualize any of it. I suspected that my thinking in simple if-then statements, was less of a cognitive burden, and an advantage over visualizing. I've only just heard of aphantasia, which seems to have served me well. On a spatial abilities tests, I usually scored above the 99th percentile, but I was young. Those images are in there somewhere, I think they're just utilized differently.

I read about it in the New Yorker a couple days ago. I immediately realize that I was hyperphantasic. I took the questionnaire and I’m in the 98 percentile. It was stunning to realize. I had never even considered that other people do not perceive what I perceive. I never even questioned it. All I can say is that it was nothing short of a tectonic shift in my understanding myself and my relationships and my personality traits. I barely scratched the surface, reflecting on events in my life must have been shaped by it. Sometimes I feel like it was a superpower, and others I felt like it was a crushing burden. But I’m glad to be able to put his name on it and do you understand that other people experience things so differently

My sister told me about aphantasia last year, and she told me about the New Yorker article a few days ago. She has the condition, and when she described it, I realized that I had it, too. When I try to visualize something, it feels like there is an image at the back of my head, and I’m trying to see the projected image through a fog. I do see vivid images when I’m falling asleep, dreaming, or waking up. When I draw, I have to sketch something crude first, to edit in shape and to add details. I can recognize whether the drawing matches what I intended. I was given an intelligence test at school when I was about 9, and I could draw an object from a different angle from that presented, but when I was asked to recall a sequence of colored beads on a string, I couldn’t do it. I do have trouble when I have to remember left from right in directions. I am left-handed, and I am on the autism spectrum. I am a semi-retired chemist. I like to re-purpose or jury-rig things when I can’t find the exact tool that I need.

Yesterday my sister sent me an article about aphantasia. I had never heard about it before but it sounded quite familiar. Even though I read quite a few articles about neurodivergence recently, I never came across the term aphantasia. Since yesterday I know that most people visualize their thoughts and moments whereas I don`t. It is fascinating how different human brains work. There are many aspects we are much more aware of in comparison to the past but there certainly still is a lot to learn about human brains...

Now 82 years old, I was amazed decades ago, when something gave me an inkling that other people saw images. So I a asked a good friend.good friend. If she could see the numeral 5.. she said yes and that it was red. I practically passed out! Eventually I learned that there was a word for this condition. Wow. it helps me understand why I cannot tell the difference between all of the skinny long haired blondes in the Tromp administration or the good looking maile doctors in the TV hospital programs. I would be of absolutely no use to a police department trying to make a sketch of a possible suspect. Now that I have read the article in the New Yorker, I have been trying to alert anyone who is, or knows a psychiatrist, psychologist,, social worker, or counselor of any kind to read it. Maybe then people would stop trying, telling me to sit comfortably, close my eyes, and imagine the visualizesomething that I like thike,say, - no, not a beach, more likely my favorite library-because it is an absolute waste of time. Also I have been itold that I am in denial about things like how difficult my relationship was with my father, for example. But naming this condition now it leaves me of the pressure of that shaming./blaming.

I just always lived like this and I thought it was just normal that some people had images in their head and others didn't. More intensely I spoke about it when I met my now-wife. She is probably more on the hyperphantasic end of the spectrum. EVERYTHING is an image for her. She has the "animal of the day" in her head which can be a pink squirrel. She can remember dates of events YEARS back because every year is a (curiously, counter-clockwise-arranged) circle with slots for each day and she literally "sees" where, and hence when, an event was. Mind-boggling for me. Here and there I kept pointing out to people how my brain functions to raise awareness but for most of the last 30 years (as a child I didn't care or think much of it) I was not aware that it has a name and dedicated research. Now, since 5-10years I read and watch content as it pops up. It's no big deal for me, nothing that impacts my personal or professional life (software engineering and "knowledge work") in any shape of form. For me it's a funny fact that I use in these ice-breaker-games that happen sometimes.