A Dishinger

Just visual, I think. I have a way of coping with maps that is rather odd. I go over the entire route and I actually feel the trip from beginning to end. I memorize highway and street names as well as turns, and that way, I can navigate either without the map (if the area is more familar) or with GPS backing me up (if it isn't). Music -- I can play almost anything by ear but cannot sing it correctly. I played in orchestras and bands for years and it is the physical act of playing and feeling the specific vibrations of the instrument and the hand positions that help me memorize music. I do get "earworms" often, songs stuck in my head, but even with extensive musical training, cannot hum or sing them well. I've not thought about taste or hearing being affected. I will have to think on those!

A Scottish fiction writer I follow told his readers in our Facebook group about his own aphantasia last year. I had no idea that my inability to "see" things in my mind's eye had a name! I have struggled for years to be able to visualize during guided meditations. I thought I was just really, really bad at it. Turns out that I can remember things almost exclusively by feeling them -- almost to the point of synethesia, feeling colors. I had just assumed I had a bad memory, but I could always recall things that were physically or emotionally intense -- just not visually. I still have what I think are visual dreams, but the brief memory of them is always visceral and verbal, not visual. Photographs can help me remember things somewhat, so I do rely on them quite a bit now. I am the kid of a visual artist, so not being able to see things in my mind's eye has always seemed weird for me. I am better at things like pottery, though I have been teaching myself again to draw -- just not from memory. I like a challenge!