How did you first discover aphantasia?

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.

In my fifties I discovered that other people can “see” the characters in a book which is why they sometimes complain that an actor in a film adaptation doesn’t look like the character they’d imagined. Asking friends and family it turned out I’m the only one who doesn’t “see” things in my mind. I have a good memory but it’s definitely not a “seeing” type of memory. A couple of days ago I heard someone on the radio speaking about aphantasia and so a quick online search and hear I am, wondering what else about how my mind works hasn’t occurred to me as odd yet 😂

Seven or eight years ago I was reading a magazine, obviously I can't picture which one, with an article that asked readers to picture a green ring. I tried for about five minutes and saw nothing but black. I asked my wife if she could see one. She closed her eyes and a second later said, "Yes." That caused me to do some research, and I found that I was in a small minority that had no mind's eye. A little later I realized I couldn't mentally reproduce any of the other senses either. I'm an amateur musician, and can't "hear" the chords and notes in familiar music, much less the instruments. Interestingly perhaps, (I'm new here) my vocal chords and fingers do remember, so I can hum them, play them on multiple instruments and improvise on them, somehow sensing what the next note needs to be rather than hearing it in my mind. I do sometimes, not often recently,"see" when in the hypnagognic state, usually in color, sometimes black and white, never in great detail. I suspect the capability is more likely to come the more I need to sleep. I also dream and hear in color, but only remember what a dream was about, without images, and only for a few groggy seconds while waking up. I'm here because classical musicians who've never had aphantasia have told me they can hear more detail when they play back pieces mentally if they practice doing it more, so I figure I ought to be able to see a lousy green ring and hear chopsticks on a piano. I think aromas are out of the question. PS, it'd be a good idea if the "enter" directions mentioned that ⌘ is an Apple Mac command symbol and ctrl + shift is needed on a Windows PC. A button that says "Submit" is an even better idea.

I found an article in the New York times about Zemen's research. I just randomly picked up the paper that day.

I discovered the word aphantasia in The New Yorker (online), October 27, 2025 from a daily email news summary I receive. It blew my mind. This is me! I'm now really curious since reading the article this afternoon. I also have memory loss and loss of "spacial relations", and no sense of direction. The memory loss and spacial relations whatever are a result of five years of ECT (Electro convulsive therapy, AKA shock therapy) as treatment for depression. The treatment worked. I don't know if I've had aphantasia my whole life or just since the ECT. I don't know if anyone in my family would know, either. It's not exactly a common topic of discussion!

A few months back (I'm 59 yo) my adult daughter explained to me that she has synesthesia. She said that she tried to tell me years ago that when she looks at people, she sees their colors, and sometimes a shape to go with it, and that I dismissed it as nonsense. So when she told me this, I told her that I can't picture things in my mind. She gave it a name -- aphantasia -- and blew my mind. I always thought I just had a horrible memory for certain things. It is reassuring to put a name to the cause.

I found out I had Aphantasia some years ago, from an article in Scientific American, though I don't remember when I've read it. As an architect it can be quite debilitating sometimes. I lack a “mind’s eye” but I dream and I do it sometimes in colour, I can do math in my head and I can solve geometry in my head. My father is hyperphantastic, and my mom seems to be aphantastic like I am.

I found out I had Aphantasia when I saw someone talking about it on tiktok. I was shocked! I didn't know people could actually "see" images when they closed their eyes. I am 57 years old and just now finding out that I am the different one. I am the one that only sees blackness when I close my eyes. I am devastated. I was ok when I didn't know that I had no mind's eye, but now that I know I am trying to wrap my head around it. I wish there was a therapy or something to help develop your mind's eye. My parents are both deceased so I can't ask them, but my sister does not have Aphantasia and she thinks I am crazy because she doesn't understand why I can't see anything when I close my eyes. She says she can actually picture my great grandmother's kitchen and still conjur up the feeling sitting on her lap. She can see my late Father's face, hear his voice and laughter. I am so jealous, I have nothing just black silence.

I discovered it like so many here, after stumbling across the term online. I’ve found it impossible to actually visualize something since high school, when a coach encouraged visualization for performance improvement. “Visualize yourself peeling an orange” and I absolutely felt so frustrated, why would we be asked to do something that’s not possible? No wonder I never got better at free throws, I couldn’t visualize that either 😝 I’ve spent a lot of time practicing meditation throughout my life and I’ve found it to be such a struggle all the times I’m told to visualize things. So it’s a huge relief to understand that this is, in fact, a real phenomena and I understand now why nobody seemed to understand my frustration. I particularly believe it more, given the scientific evidence. Seeing mri’s to validate helps me feel confident, but honestly I’d love a true diagnosis so it doesn’t seem weird when I tell friends and family I think I have this.

I discovered the term ‘aphantasia’ last week on a watercolour Facebook page. There was a discussion on using reference photos versus using your imagination to create the image on the page. There was a comment from a lady who explained that she can’t use her imagination to create an image for a proposed artwork as she has a condition called aphantasia where she can’t see images in her mind. After some internet searches, I now know that I have aphantasia and SDAM. I am 59 years old and have always claimed that I do not have visual memories that I assumed was due to my childhood trauma and I’ve been working with various therapists over the past ten years to try to come to terms with my trauma with the sole purpose of being able to regain my visual memories - I had assumed that if I got to the point where I could cope with the bad memories then I might also regain the good ones. It was quite a blow to the heart to think that this will probably never happen.

In BBC 4. It transpires that my son and goid friend also have the same condition. I wonder how many other people are unaware that this has a name and that we’re not alone.