Is this aphantasia?
3 min readByAndrew Penov
Hello! Could you please tell me if I have aphantasia or not? I was researching meditation techniques, and people mentioned being able to visualize entire rooms—like imagining a chair, table, carpet, and so on. Do they actually "see" these things as if in a video game?
After looking into it, I thought I might have aphantasia, but I’m not entirely sure. Maybe I just have extremely poor visual imagination. I can conjure fleeting impressions of shapes and colors, but even these aren’t detailed. For example, I can’t visualize faces at all. I might briefly sense the presence of a nose, forehead, or eyes—a glance or a characteristic smile—but never as a vivid image.
You know, I’d compare my imagination to a bat’s echolocation: a faint imprint in the depths of my mind that doesn’t truly qualify as imagery. When I’m drunk or listening to intense music, my brain floods with fantasies—but again, just fleeting sensations, flashes of shapes and movement. For instance, I might imagine a lightning bolt streaking across a dark backdrop.
Yesterday, when I tried hard to visualize a spoon, I saw something like a gray shape against blackness, flickers of curvature, a metallic glint, and the sound of a spoon clinking against a plate.
When my friend didn’t understand my question at first and then said his memories "play back like a video," I felt really upset.
I don’t enjoy museums, theaters, movies, or traveling to other countries. In the moment, I like it, but afterward, I can’t recall much—just a few quasi-visual flashes behind my eyes.
Also, as part of an experiment, I spent several hours in complete darkness and started to navigate quite well. At one point, I think I began to distinguish the walls—some kind of black on black—and when I sat in a corner and looked up, it felt like the darkness was receding from both sides upwards.
Oddly, I’ve discovered through apps that I’m good at memorizing image sequences. For example, after staring at a picture for a minute, I can remember details like the color of a button on a sleeve. But again, it’s more of a "felt sense" of the image than actually seeing it.
Music, though, I can replay in my head like a tape recorder, even extending a melody from a short snippet. At bedtime, it’s like a concert in my mind.
My dreams can be hyper-realistic. Once, I found myself in a city that resembled a parody of New York, with numerous skyscrapers and an endless crowd of people. At the same time, I had incredible vision. I could see a crack in the glass of a skyscraper a kilometer away. It felt like I had entered some kind of micro-reality with absolute vision. remember these dreams like movies. Well... there was a plot and a couple of micro-sensations of images lasting less than a second. If I have seen something before, like a TV series, I remember what it was about and experience a feeling similar to déjà vu. "I remember that I have seen this"
Every person had a face; they were talking, and I could see their clothes... This dream happened again; I was driving through a beautiful forest and examining beetles on the leaves of trees. Online, I’ve read that with aphantasia, there’s nothing—the brain works like a calculator, with zero hints of visualization. But I think you’re knowledgeable about this topic and could help me!