Rewiring How I Work & Learn as a Multisensory Aphantasic — I Built a Sense-by-Sense Scoring System to Find My Gaps & Superpowers
1 min readByDavid Bruce Douglas
I'm 54 and just discovered I have multisensory aphantasia. Which means I've spent decades trying to learn and work using strategies designed for people whose brains work nothing like mine.
So I'm starting over. This week I'm running experiments on my work environment, my learning process, and how I absorb and retain information — all designed around my actual sensory profile instead of someone else's.
I've built a baseline assessment of my aphantasia — sense by sense — including where I'm fully offline, where I have partial capacity, and where I've developed surprising strengths. I've also mapped out my blind spots and superpowers for each sense. I'll share that here and update it as I go.
First experiment: using a book I'm currently listening to as a test case for building an external knowledge architecture — since I can't store information internally the way most people do, I need to build it outside my head in a way I can navigate.
Would love to hear from others — especially around:
• What work or learning setups have actually worked for you?
• How do you retain and organize information without internal imagery?
• What strategies did you throw out that everyone swore by?