Discussions

I am a self-diagnosed multisensory aphantasic with a very clear case of SDAM.

So let´s consider my mind at rest. No images, no sounds. The only thing in there is my internal monolog. I know it is not really auditory because there is no volume control.  If i want music it is me singing and me humming  – nothing else.

It is nice and cozy in here. calm. peaceful. much better than those beaches they say you should think about when meditating. all those wave noises, no thank you. If i want total peace i just tell myself to stop talking.

what happens, however, when i step out into the world? Images, noise, bussle. too much, too much, I want to go home!

I am exagerating. Typically this only happens in places like street markets or other very transited places. I have to leave and find somewhere peaceful.

This latter condition is called Agoraphobia and i have been clinically diagnosed with this condition. So no suspect self-diagnosis.

The Agoraphobia diagnosis was very helpful for me personally and socially. i could explain my panic attacks. however, with my discovery of Aphantasia i realized it was not a phobia (irrational fear) but a sensory overload. In the Aphantasic womb that is my house things are calm. Probably a 1 on the stimulation scale. Outside in a busy, populated, noisy place it changes to a 10.

So my Agoraphobia seems to be no more than a consequence of my Aphantasia.

Are there others out there than have both conditions?

I have been conducting my own ‘research’ and seem to have stumbled on something. I would have thought that if people can really see with their mind eye they would be able to draw from memory. A simple test of of asking someone to draw a bicycle quickly shows that this ability does not translate so easily into the page. However, I and other people i suspect as having this condition seem to do much better. Why is this? Perhaps you could try for yourselves?

There is a lot of stuff on the internet about not being able to visualize at will or at all. However, I have never seen this as a major issue for me since I rarely need to visualize an apple and in my view the only real use of the ability would be to describe the culprit of a crime I had witnessed. I would not be able to do that with any detail. Maybe size, race and gender.

In  my case Aphantasia, more than anything, is a lack of visual memory. That means a lack of memory of events not just people´s faces or the places i have lived in (which are many).

I  lived for  more than 5 years in each the UK, Canada, Spain and the Dominican Republic. Now i am getting to my point. In each of these situations it seems that someone else actually lived that time and not me. This is because of the scarcity of  visual memory of my time there. I know i lived in those places but would be hard pressed to describe any specific event or person.

For me the past is sort of black and white. Then and now, but with the Then compacted into a homogeneous unit. So one year ago and 20 years ago are essentially the same since i have almost no visual memory of either.

The consequences of this disassociation with past events are interesting. An example. I was attacked in the street last year and taken to hospital with my nose destroyed (n0t just broken) and covered in blood. a stranger found me and called the ambulance to take me to hospital. Fine so far. When i woke up the next day in a hospital bed it was already like ancient history.  Over and done with.

A similar situation occurred when i was robbed at gun point in the DR (i mentioned this event in an earlier post). I was in a group of about 12 people but it was my girlfriend and I who were the actual target of the robbery. The rest of the group were traumatized to a greater or lesser extent but I was not. I had not been injured so the robbery was already in my big bag of past events. I was ready to go for another beer but had no takers.

Now some information about me. Like a lot of people who believe they have Aphantasia I am self-diagnosed. I became aware of limited visualization skills more than 40 years ago in a course that included the Memory Palace technique. I could not even visualize the Palace never mind the objects to be remembered. I figured memorizing lists was hardly an interesting skill anyway since i could just make a written list and promptly forgot about the issue.

It was only when i saw a report on Professor Zeman´s work on Aphantasia that i connected the dots.

Serious question. Sexual fantasy is an important part of life. I see nothing when I think of a beach or a naked woman, so porno films give me what the rest of the world has apparently had since they were kids. Sexual imagery.

Ok. So the 95% can create images in their minds of all sorts of depravity but if I want that i have to look for movies and get classified as a loser or a pervert. 

Hi,

my name is Kate and I live in Scotland. I wondered if there were any other people here living in Scotland?

I’ve contacted a few organisations after being inspired by reading about the recent Aphantasia Awareness Day they had in Texas, and I wanted to try to do that over here, but it would surely be best to get to know and work alongside other aphantasic people (I myself am aphantasic).

If you could, please do say hello!

I chanced upon a radio programme last week about aphantasia and was absolutely gobsmacked to find out that most people can really visualise things!  All these years I thought everyone only saw darkness when they closed their eyes.   It’s blown my mind.   I asked my husband what he sees and he’s the same as me but when I told him what it’s like for other people he just wasn’t bothered saying that he’d lived this long without seeing things, so what? 
But he’s never spent hours in the library reading books about improving your memory or reaching your goals (book – ‘visualise yourself doing the thing you want to do’,  me – ‘I am vaulting over a gate’.  He hasn’t been to a yoga class or antenatal class with the relaxation bit – ‘imagine you’re on a beach with the sun shining down on you’, me – I’m on a beach and the sun is shining’ thinking I could be at home doing something.  He isn’t reading a book at the moment about breathing that wants you to focus on the inside of your body (?!).  
I was telling a friend about it and she says she was on that beach soaking up the sun, dipping her toes in the sea (what!).  I asked her to think about a horse and when I asked her what colour it was she said it was brown.  Then said, ‘ And now a white one and a black one are here.’   They’re moving!  I thought maybe you might see a picture of a horse and that was it. 
I can’t help but feel I must have missed out on a lot ( but then at least I’ve only just found out so have been oblivious to it till now), and wonder if I would have achieved more with my life.                                
On the plus side I’m not a worrier and I think maybe that’s because I’m not imagining any catastrophes.   
My son moved to Canada when he was 25 ( I’m in England) and my daughter has been to far flung places on holiday and people would say to me that I must be worried about them and I would say I was because I didn’t want to seem uncaring, but really I wasn’t worried because I didn’t think of anything bad happening.  That might just be me though and nothing to do with being aphantasic.  Does anyone else think the same?

I’m pretty sure based on previous conversations, that Aphantasia is the inability to recall all senses, like sight,  taste, touch, sound, etc. But this website’s description (and thus what shows up if you look it up on google) says its excursively visual or at least fails to mention it can affect the ability to recall any other sense. To be fair most info on Aphantasia focuses exclusively on visuals, I just want to make sure the description of Aphantasia that most people will see is accurate as the current description here doesn’t fully include people like myself who can’t create any or at lease many senses, including but not limited to sight. I would like to know other more qualified peoples thoughts on this though.

So, I’ve known I’ve had aphantasia for a while now, nothing new there. However, I’ve made yet another discovery today that people even close their eyes and, without imagining things, see static or a pattern similar to the bottom of a pool, moving. Now, it was a video and obviously commenters aren’t always experts but in the comments people were saying it’s because light filters through your eyelids and the little veins and your eyes are just processing that. But if that’s the case…why can’t I see that? So I was just curious if anyone else sees this or if it is just complete blackness like what I see. Just wondering if it has to do with aphantasia or if my eyelids are just..thick or something. Now, I do have kind of blurry vision but I see light just fine.