My perspective on how Aphantasia impacts life Is a little bit different from most people's

I understand deeply, with a profound sense of empathy, how aphantasia touches nearly every aspect of a person's life. You probably don't need me to add more—things like reading a novel, recalling the faces of loved ones, reliving beautiful views during travel ,imaging scenes during DND, or even predicting parabola in video games. But honestly, I don't dwell too much on this functional loss or weak. It's undeniably terrible of course, but for me, what I truly cannot bear—what breaks my heart—is the profound loss of experiences, knowledge and inner feeling.

I's as if those of us with aphantasia are living at a lower "life efficiency" than neurotypical people. From birth, they lose or reduce the experiences that normal people have every day. Some people imagine moving little people outside the car window when they are in a car, imagine a happy experience before going to sleep, recall the past experience when they go to a place they haven't been to in a long time, or even have beautiful sexual fantasies while reading.. I can accept the absence of certain abilities—after all, that's just part of how our brains are made, like any other diffenrence in talent. But this stripping away of experiences? It fills me with raw anger and deep frustration. It's an irreplaceable void, a defect that no amount of effort can mend. The inner worlds that normal people navigate are forever out of our reach, impossible to replicate.

If life is a one-time journey for everyone, even normal folks might regret never trying certain things—like spacewalking, for instance. But give them enough resources and time, and they could make it happen, the most important thing is --sharing that exact same thrill with astronauts who've done it before. However, for people with aphantasia, every activity they engage in throughout their lives lacks an experience that we and normal people cannot share.—like an invisible wall we can't touch or cross. We miss out on a layer of experience that neurotypicals inherently share in everything they do. At the end of one's life, for a normal person, their life is incomplete because of things they haven't tried, while for someone with a aphantasia, there are inevitable missing parts of every experience they've had, along with the things they haven't tried, constitutes a part of their incompleteness.

That's all I want to say.I dont know if someone think about aphantasia just like me.

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Neal White•recently•edited

I only found out about aphantasia a few years ago. I didn't feel a sense of loss. Instead, I felt a sense of understanding: This explains a lot. Your description of an "invisible wall" sounds similar to my experience: It feels as if there's a wall of black glass blocking the vision of my mind's eye. I'm on the far end of the aphantasia scale. It's almost always black. However, I can somehow sense what is behind the wall. I can imagine a familiar scene and sketch what is hidden behind the black. For me, aphantasia hasn't felt limiting. I score very high on those 3D shapes you need to mentally rotate on an IQ test. I often seem to know the answer before I've even scanned all the choices. I've learned to punch holes in that glass wall or even smear colors across the blackness, when lucid dreaming. There have been 2 times in my life that I've seen something other than black when I was fully awake. The first was scary: I was playing an early arcade video game "Star Fire" which flashed the whole screen during tie fighter attacks, possibly triggering something akin to epilepsy: I continued to see the game after I quit playing. It would reappear whenever I closed my eyes. I was freaking out because I was SEEING THINGS WITH MY EYES CLOSED! At the time, I couldn't understand why my friends were not as alarmed as I was. The blackness faded back into place after an hour or so. The second time was when I lost 1/6th of my field of vision, due to an "aura without migraine". My vision was missing in a curved pie shape regardless of whether or not my eyes were closed. What did I see in that pie wedge? There were impossibly thin lines of red, yellow, and blue, which were so thin and sharp it almost hurt to look at them. They bounced outward along the edges of the wedge at a frantic speed. What was in between those lines? Nothing. Not black. Not gray. NOTHING. If I were to draw it, I'd use dark gray, but that's not what I saw. There was no color, just nothingness. I suggest you don't dwell on what you can't do and concentrate on what you can do and what makes you happy. Do what you can to capture the moments you can never relive with photos and videos. Try to learn how to experience lucid dreaming. It's entirely possible that you could learn to see SOMETHING with your eyes closed. If your life feels incomplete, perhaps you consider getting a pet or two. A dog will be your friend for life. Kittens are best adopted in pairs.

Michael Roberts•recently

As far as not dwelling on this is concerned ,that sounds good advice. Some advice from my late mother was "If you can do nothing to change it ,don’t worry about it " . And I wonder if the use of camera on mobile phones which now seems ever present will help us cope ..