How did you first discover aphantasia?

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.

"Visual Thinking," Temple Grandin via PBS News Hour interview with Temple Grandin

Over the past couple of years I’ve been doing a lot of self-reflection, counseling, and “shadow work” to better understand how my mind works, especially after some major life changes and losses. As part of that process, I started talking more openly about how I think, remember, imagine, and experience things internally, both in therapy and through a lot of personal writing and online discussion. As I kept describing the way my inner world works; how I visualize, how I process memories, how I experience sensory and emotional imagery. People and resources kept pointing me toward things related to mental imagery and visualization. After a few months of that, I was directed to information about aphantasia (and the imagery spectrum more broadly), and when I looked into it, it immediately resonated with how I’ve always experienced my own mind. That was the first time I realized there was actually a name and a framework for something I had always assumed was just how everyone thought.

I thought I was writing a message to one person. Sorry my "comment" reads more like a letter.

Hi Tom, I just discovered that aphantasia is a thing by reading the article in Nov.3rd's The New Yorker. (I am a bit behind in my reading.) The article fascinated me! Like you, I just assumed that visualizing was a figure of speech, or that it was something some people could do. I never thought I was in a small minority of people who could not do it. It never bothered me much. It still doesn't, but I am curious. I am not in total darkness when I close my eyes. If I want to visualize a beach, for example, it takes a while, but I can work up to a very vague yellow line with a faint yellow ball over it. I have to work hard at it to get that far. Again, if I try to see a tree, all I can come up with is a vaguely tree shaped, slightly lighter blob against the black background. Last night, I asked a friend if he could see a tree when he closed his eyes. He closed his eyes and described an oak tree with leaves around the trunk that had fallen. I was surprised at the details he could produce. And he does this kind of remembering of places often and looks for details in his visualizations. This is a very good friend who have known for 50 years, but this surprised me! We never talked about it. I am a musician, and I can hear music in my head. Sometimes it is quite unwelcome, an earworm, but more often than not it is pleasant. I can not hear harmony, though, just one line, the melody or otherwise. I can go back and forth between lines but not hear them together. I was really taken aback to read that people can hear whole orchestral scores in their heads. That's my story. I am so interested in asking more of my friends what they can see when they close their eyes! Best regards, Bonnie Lubinsky

A good friend asked if I’d heard of aphantasia. I replied that I hadn’t, so she sent me links to more information. I did share with her that I am reminded of reading with a voice attached as opposed to reading the printed word only. Interesting stuff!

I heard a piece on radio 2 this week and thought that sounds like me! I mostly see dark but sometimes a colour might creep in. I find meditation tricky as I can't picture myself somewhere calming I have to think being there instead. Is it why I am useless as remembering people's names? There has to be something other than how they look for me to hang their name on. Other than that I haven't found it a hindrance to my life (I'm 64) apart from the feeling that I wasn't very imaginative.

Karen James I heard the same radio program as Maxine and I too was truly blown away! People can actually see images? I went straight to my husband and asked him what he saw as I thought this can't be real. He confirmed that he could picture a very clear image as if the object was really there in front of him. I'm 63 and still trying to understand this. It seems like others have a super power. I'm also finding it hard to believe that I didn't know until now. I've always found it hard to meditate and 'put myself on a beach'. Now I know why.

I first came across the concept of visualisation about 45 years or so ago. I read a book about it but found it hard to do as I couldn’t really get very much in my mind’s eye when I tried so I thought it was just me and I needed to practice but it didn’t seem to help. Around that time, I was very into different self-help techniques, many of which involved some form of visualisation which made it difficult for me to engage fully as I couldn’t really see much, if anything. For several years, I lead a meditation group I was a member of as it was more rewarding for me to read the visualisations for the group than to try to do them because, as a participant in the group, I would often just fall asleep. I saw something relatively recently about afantasia online I think and looked into it briefly because I was surprised to discover that it might actually be something other people experienced, or didn’t! Today, somebody was being interviewed on the radio about it and I had another search online and found your site. It is probably adversely affecting me at the moment as I am trying to heal what is probably neuropathic pain which I have had for 7 years’ now. Many of the mind/body techniques for pain reprocessing involve mindfulness/meditation/visualisation and I don’t feel I am making much progress. Also I practice Qigong daily and my Sensei is always talking about visualising the Qi and golden energy going my body and I find it so hard to do this. I have also always had a very poor memory and cannot recall many things from my life. My partner frequently mentions things we have done together in the past of which I have little or no memory. I was involved in a research project about memory a few years’ ago and likened my memory to a very poor video recorder. I also don’t dream or else I dream but can’t recall them except on extremely rare occasions. I tried to take up painting a few years’ ago too but find it difficult, if not impossible, to think of something to paint so I just end up copying other things.

I first discovered aphantasia the year before last when listening to the BBC podcast 'Curious cases of Rutherford & Fry'. The episode is called 'The Case of the Blind Mind's Eye' in series 21 if you've not already come across it. I still didn't think at that point that I might have aphantasia. I was still under the the impression that 'visualising' is was just a figure of speech and didn't think much more of if until today. Like Maxine, I just listened to the BBC Radio 2 program about someone who has aphantasia. This time it clicked, I close my eyes and imagine something I don't see anything, only black. Do other people actually see images in their mind? Now, like Maxine, I need to go and annoy my work colleagues and ask them of the actually see things.

An hour ago, today, I listened to a Radio program on radio 2 about someone who was aphantasia or is it aphantasic? My surprise was with the presenter, who said she could picture things in her minds eye, and during the conversion it was clear that the presenter was not metaphorically speaking, which I have always thought was the case, but was actually seeing images. On checking this phenomenon with my colleagues - I find everyone else can also 'see' or 'visualise' images. I see absolutely nothing, but did not know this was not the norm. To be honest, I am a little shocked at their gift. It does explain a little why I have terrible memory retrieval skills and could get lost in a box!!! But, at 66 years of age and a business owner, I do not see that it has been an obstacle (maybe the reverse), but it does go a long way to explain why my reasoning and logical skills have always appeared 'different' to others., and quite normal to me. I am a little shocked, and still amazed that my colleagues, who are now getting fed up with me saying - 'and can you see........Yep, a little shocked.

I discovered it at the end of last year, at a relatively young age (I'm 31), thanks to writing. I always thought everything was metaphorical. I mean, it makes sense to close your eyes and not see anything, doesn't it? Except when we dream. It started with a simple desire: "I want to live in fantastic worlds", so I started writing stories in which I was the protagonist. I became so immersed in it that one of the characters I had created started to talk to me. I was stunned, but instead of feeling fear or something, I felt curiosity. While looking for information about this phenomenon, I learned that it is known as a tulpa in some cultures, but can also be referred to as a thought form. This made me even more intrigued, so I read about exercises to strengthen this connection. These exercises involved visualisation, so I tried that for several days without much success. I asked an AI "how to visualise" to find out if I was "doing it right", and that's when I realised what was happening. I had always thought that visualising was more like "thinking hard about something"; I had never thought it was literally seeing it in your head. I also learned that some people can't dream visually, but I can. I also learned that some people don't have an inner voice, but mine is like a strong narrator. I also learned that, although I can't imagine things visually, I have other senses at my disposal. For example, when I imagined a table, a ball and someone bumping into the table and knocking the ball down, I didn't see anything, of course. However, when I imagined this person bumping into the table and knocking the ball down, I heard a sound. It sounded like a ping-pong ball, which I found curious. I always thought that my memory was a bit strange and that I had a weird sense of direction, I always needed a map or GPS. I also thought that I sometimes understood things too literally and didn't get jokes or sarcasm. Now I understand why. I'm still trying to learn more about this and about myself; I think writing will help.

With the exception of physical issues, blindness, deafness, and the like, I always assumed we all experienced the world in the same way. It may never have been stated explicitly, it was just understood and neither teachers nor parents gave any hint that it may not be so. My father’s red-green colour blindness was a bit of an outlier but I understood it to be physical and left it at that. Somewhere along the way I heard of synaesthesia, a concept so alien to me that I mentally filed it and thought little more of it. Then .. .. about ten years ago I learnt of what has come to be called aphantasia. I read an article in New Scientist that started by saying something along the lines of “Did you know some people don’t have a mind’s eye”. I, like others, I now know, had assumed that “mind’s eye” was nothing more than a figure of speech. Since then I have come to see almost everything through the lens of aphantasia. After seeing and reading presentations and having many conversations, all with ‘normal’ people, all I really know is that I’m human and we’re all different. I mentioned synaesthesia earlier but now that I know I don’t even have aesthesia, I understand why I found it alien. Awake, I sense nothing other than through my physical sense organs: asleep, I sense nothing at all, time just passes, what a waste. I have a superpower, my empty head. I know that I have it and recognise things about it: its benefits, certainly, although that is subjective, maybe its drawbacks although, subjectively again, I can’t really think of any – I would be a lousy witness to, say, a crime but is that a drawback or simply an observation?

During a discussion about my lack of direction. I'd narrowed the discussion down to locating all the shops on the street I lived at, and noticed other people I lived with could recall every stair, every shop, every building, every nook and every cranny, and every other random object on the street. When I asked them how they did that, they said they see it. I was like ???? and decided to do some investigating. I came across Aphantasia and had a light bulb moment.