@agrebanier
Joined about 4 years agoAlice Grebanier is a retired biochemist. In her mid-thirties, she discovered that, unlike most other people, her mind’s eye was blind. In the decades since that surprising discovery, she has given a lot of thought to how her mind manages to work without visualization.
First of all, you have reached the age of 85, having had a career in research on algebraic topology, all without ever having considered whether you visualize in the same way as other people. So, whether you are aphantasic or not, you seem to have had a reasonably successful life without any knowledge of aphantasia. If you are aphantasic, you almost certainly were always this way, and it may even have been beneficial in your chosen line of work. Sometimes it can be easier to think abstractly if you don't feel the need to picture anything. What good would it be to know for sure if you are aphantasic or not? In practical terms, there may not be much benefit, other than a better understanding of yourself. Is there a cure or a way to alleviate aphantasia? Right now, there is nothing that works even a little bit for most people. You might be interested to know that when people who know they are congenitally aphantasic are asked if they want to be able to visualize, many say that they would want it only if they could turn it off if they wanted. After all, they are used to the way their minds work without visualization and they don't know if they would like the change. Of course, for someone who acquired aphantasia through some event, the answer is often that they would like to regain an ability that they once had, and there are some with congenital aphantasia who also would like that ability. Is networking with other aphantasics useful? That depends on what you might want to get out of it. You posted a question here, so I suppose you think there might be something gained. If nothing else, it could be interesting. You should be aware, though, that the experience of aphantasia varies from person to person, even in such basic traits as how many senses are affected, whether you have visual dreams or not, etc., etc. For myself, I found that diversity of experience fascinating. For the items you listed as "why" you think you might have aphantasia, none of them are really diagnostic. 1) You recognize people's faces, so you don't have prosopagnosia, which itself is not 100% linked to aphantasia anyway. 2) Maybe you just never learned to draw, or you need to have a physical or photographic reference in order to make a drawing. The more relevant question is whether you can form a mental image of your mother's face (different from knowing that you would recognize her face). 3) If you want to "game" an Alzheimer's test, go in prepared with a strategy for remembering a list of things for at least 30 minutes. Visualizing them isn't the only possibility. You were able to remember them for 2 minutes, and you didn't think it important to remember for longer than that, so why would you remember a boring list that is irrelevant to your life? 4) Professional career choices are not dictated by aphantasia, though there is some relationship. In your work, did you ever mentally visualize topological surfaces in some way or not? That might be a hint.
It's hard to know what traits are or are not associated with aphantasia. The most directionally challenged person I have ever known was my mother. She did not know left from right. She could get lost in her native city, New York, where the streets in most areas go in numerical or alphabetic order. She also was one of the most visual people I have ever known, and often would tell people to fix a moment in their mind by holding up their fingers to form a rectangle and taking a mental picture. I'm aphantasic, so I was hopeless at taking those mental pictures as she suggested. But my sense of direction is much better than hers ever was. But that doesn't mean there is no association. For example, the occurence of SDAM appears to overlap with aphantasia, but they are not the same thing. I am aphantasic, and my autobiographical memory is pretty good, even without visual imagery, so it's not a one-to-one correspondence.
I agree with the main point of this article, that phonics are an important part of learning how to read a written language that is based on an alphabet. However, I am a bit disturbed that the overall tone is kind of dogmatic about this. There is no single way of teaching to read that works for all children, so flexibility is important. Just as an aphantasic person will come to realize that trying to follow visualization instructions for a guided meditation is a hopeless task and that they will need to do something else if they want to meditate, a dyslexic child, depending on how and why they are dyslexic, may find a standardized approach to phonics incomprehensible and may need something else. I speak from experience. When my oldest son started first grade in the late 1980’s, he attended a school that took a 100% phonics approach to teaching reading. I hadn’t expected that he would have a problem. He knew the letters of the alphabet, and he knew their most common sounds. However, the combination of letters into words made little sense to him, and he struggled a lot. Even with help from a reading specialist, he made very little progress during that year. During the summer between first and second grade, he came home with a pile of phonics worksheets. I could see that they both bored him and made him angry, so I took a somewhat different approach to keep him from forgetting what little he had learned in first grade. We went to the library at least once a week and took out several books that either he selected or that I thought he might find interesting. We spent some time every morning reading them together. It was a struggle, and though he wasn’t getting worse, he wasn’t getting much better at deciphering words by sounding them out. By chance, one time I took out a book, The Big Green Book, by Robert Graves and illustrated by Maurice Sendak. When we started reading it together, I realized that it was far more complex than any of the other books we’d worked on, so the first time through I read much more of it to him than he read to me. But he really liked the book, and he would look at it on his own. It was the story that engaged him much more than the illustrations. So on subsequent days he started reading more and more of it to me. To my surprise, he found it easier to figure out pages that had longer paragraphs than the ones with single sentences. But who was I to argue? By the time we had to return the book to the library, he could read it to me with a high degree of accuracy. He hadn’t memorized it word for word. He knew the story and used that knowledge to decipher the words. So then I started taking out books that were a bit harder to read, and he did much better with those than with the easier ones. The phonics worksheets were still a mystery to him, so I stopped pushing him to work on them and focused on finding books that both interested him and challenged him a bit. Second grade was a lot better for him than first grade, at least as far as reading went. He liked reading, and he read books on his own that weren’t required for school. Spelling was another story. English spelling probably has as many exceptions as words that follow the basic rules. Eventually, since he read a lot, he got better at recognizing incorrect from correct spelling, but he couldn’t generate the correct spelling on his own when he was writing. Though I worried a lot about how he would make his way in the world, he found his own path. He went to college and has been gainfully employed as a US patent examiner for almost 20 years. That’s a job where a huge amount of reading is required which is not a problem for him. He has to write, so spellcheckers are a blessing for him. I didn’t know what the “3-cueing system” referenced in this article was, so I clicked on the link. To my surprise, the description seemed to fit pretty well the approach my son invented for himself that led to his learning to read. Start with meaning and context, apply understanding of grammatical structures, and use graphophonics as the third step to figure out individual words. The linked article quotes a paper of fMRI studies on a small number of children that implies that children do not learn to read that way and implies that no one can learn to read except by starting with phonics and not moving on until that is mastered. I’d agree that some knowledge of phonics is important, but I am dismayed by the dogmatic tone and implication that there is only one way to teach children to read. That fMRI study was tiny and in no way a good basis for broad generalizations to apply to all children. Even if the rigid structure outlined for how to teach reading will work for most children, it isn’t necessarily true for all children. I think that those with aphantasia should be especially sensitive to the need for flexibility in dealing with human differences. If my son had continued to be forced to work on decoding simple words and very simple sentences using phonics, the approach taken by the reading specialists with the best of intentions, he might never have learned to read. Instead, by finding his own path, based on an accidental book choice on my part that sparked his interest in reading for himself, he became a proficient reader. I'm not recommending this for anyone else. I'm just pointing out that rigidity in teaching is a problem. They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. When one way is not working for a student, no matter how well it might work for someone else or how well accepted the pedagogic theory, it's time to try something else.
Thank you for this article. I have admired your Instagram posts showing your work, and the additional insight into how you create them is inspiring. Using process and discovery through process to create highly imaginative art! Yes! The outcomes speak for themselves.
There is an article on the aphantasia network website about hypnopompic images and aphantasia. https://aphantasia.com/article/stories/hypnopompia/ Hypnopompia is the state between sleep and awakening. There is a related state between being awake and falling asleep called hypnagogia. Some people with aphantasia report that they see visual images during these states. Some report that they have dreams with visual imagery. There is a fair amount of variation among people with aphantasia with respect to these experiences, as well as other experiences that may have an association with aphantasia. I, for one, have no visual imagery in dreams or when falling asleep or waking up.
There's an article by Liana Scott elsewhere on this site that describes her similar experiences with the in-between-state from sleep to wakening You might find it interesting: https://aphantasia.com/article/stories/hypnopompia/ I'm an aphant, but I don't have these types of visions. I dream, but without visions. But apparently many people with aphantasia have visual dreams, even though they don't visualize while awake. So, even among people with some traits in common, there is a lot of variability with respect to other traits.
I've seen reference to an article that raises the hypothetical question of aphantasia having a role in diagnosing neurogenerative diseases. However, I'm not sure that any correlation between aphantasia and Alzheimer's disease has actually been established. But there is a paper from Hungary that evaluated distributions of vividness of visual imagery in populations divided into different age groups. You can find a link to a video presentation on the subject as well as a link to the published paper here: https://aphantasia.com/video/aphantasic-with-age/ The paper shows a decrease in vividness of visual imagery between younger and older age groups. This was a population study, not a longitudinal study that followed the same individuals over time to evaluate changes. So there definitely are limitations with respect to providing an answer to your question about whether aphantasia can get worse.
Thank you for your post! Decades ago, I first realized that other people had mental images in a way that I did not. At that time, the word "aphantasia" had not been coined, and I didn't find to much to refer to, but I did talk to people I knew about what I had discovered that was strange about me. I assumed I was not unique, but it took me more than 30 years to interact with anyone else who knew that they did not have visual imagery. The many visualizers I spoke with were somewhat curious about how someone might not be able to visualize. Because visualization was such a large part of their own mental processes, a couple of people wanted to know, if I didn't visualize, how did I think? That question was cause of much introspection on my part. The metaphor I came up with was somewhat like a cross between your description of imagining how your body feels if it were to make a specific movement and your description of imagining yourself as a "black fog of static entity" moving through a space you are trying to map. The metaphor I came up with about how I think is that I feel that I am in a completely black cave, feeling my way, twisting my body into shapes that I might not even be able to actually assume, finding connections that I am not ready to put into words. It's not really a verbal experience, except for brief feelings of "oh that!" or "this could belong with that!" But then, eventually, I feel ready to use my words to describe my thoughts. Perhaps related, when I had difficult technical issues to resolve, I often found it useful to set the problem aside, go for a walk, or maybe for a swim. It seemed as though the physical activity of walking or swimming shook loose some new ideas that eventually bubbled to the surface. So maybe that's why when I'm just thinking, but not moving, I have a sense of mentally moving my body, and most especially my hands, through some completely non-visual space.
You might be interested in an article published on this site a couple of years ago by Melanie Scheer, titled Visualizing the Invisible. She also gave a talk. At the bottom of the article, there is a link to a video of her presentation on YouTube. https://aphantasia.com/article/strategies/visualizing-the-invisible Her focus was on how people experience their own mental imagery. I was struck by the wide range of variability, not just in clarity or vividness of the mental images, but of where they were "seen" (in front of the person, at the back of their head, above their eyes, etc., etc.). We cannot actually get into someone else's mind and experience what they experience, and so we tend to think that other people must be fairly similar to us. I don't visualize, and I realize that my mental experiences are different from most other people in that respect. But I had no idea of how much visualizers may differ, one to another. I would argue that some of the examples you give of visualization may not depend on mental imagery. A drawing is not a mental image, though mental imagery may play some part in how it is created. The drawing is a physical object that anyone who has vision can see. But the process of making a drawing may also depend on having reference objects or photographs to use as a basis. Or, someone who does not have mental imagery (or even someone who does) may make some marks and then respond to what they are seeing as they add more marks to create their drawing. No matter the process, the drawing itself has a physical existence that can be shared with others in a way that mental imagery cannot be. Also, when we can describe or recognize things (a letter, a face, a scene, whatever), that will rely on visual knowledge, and my guess is that the knowledge is the source of mental images that may be generated, not vice versa. I can remember and recognize many things and provide pretty detailed descriptions of them, just as a visualizer might. However, for me, that is never accompanied by any kind of projection into a quasi-sensory mental experience. I just know what things look like without "seeing" them.
I have had a similar experience with the VVIQ. I can't really explain it, but it's almost as if when I close my eyes, my mind shuts down vision-related activity. It's not just the VVIQ, though that was what made me start thinking about this. In general, with my eyes open, I can recall visual details more readily, even though I don't really see anything in my "mind's eye."
The studies on the correlation between aphantasia and prosopagnosia (difficulty recognizing faces) are a bit mixed. But even those studies that indicate a good degree of correlation do not show that everyone with aphantasia also has difficulty with face recognition. The mind is a complex thing, and it may be that you have a better than average ability to map the spatial relationships between facial features and save that information in a retrievable form, linked together with the name and the circumstances in which you met. Perhaps that would explain why you were able to surmise that a stranger might be related to someone you knew. Or maybe there's something else going on in your brain that would explain why you "never forget a face." There are mental phenomena that are often attributed to the ability to visualize, but people with aphantasia can often perform the same tasks, probably by using a different mental "strategy."
There's a really good article by Rebecca McHale, just published on this site (https://aphantasia.com/article/strategies/aphantasia-neurodiversity-and-healing/) that would be a great starting point for your questions about aphants approaching therapy. With regard to your questions about how to answer the VVIQ, I think it's best to remember that it is a completely subjective questionnaire. Your description of how you remember people what people look like sounds a lot like a "1" on the VVIQ, in that you "know" how they look but don't have a picture in your mind. Or maybe a "2" if there is some vaguely visual thing going on in your mind. Either way, you seem to be low on the visualization scale. But really, the VVIQ is just a tool for starting to think about how your mind works with respect to visualization. A 5-point scale can hardly cover the diversity in how different people's minds work.
About visions after surgery: I've seen distinctions made between "voluntary" visual imagery while awake and "involuntary" visual imagery while dreaming while asleep or in the hypnagogic and hypnopompic states between wakefulness and sleep. Many people with aphantasia have visual dreams. I don't, but apparently visual dreams are fairly common, even for aphantasics. The vision system of the brain that is engaged in interpreting what we see (not a problem for aphantasics) is also engaged during visualization, whether while awake or dreaming. Do you have visual dreams? Whether yes or no, it may be that the stresses of the surgery caused you to have with involuntary visions while awake. I'm interested that you describe the post-surgery visions as plaguing you. One of the questions that comes up in discussions of aphantasia is whether aphantasics would like to have the ability to visualize. Some would, but the most common response I've seen is more qualified: yes but only if it can be turned off. If you are not familiar with hypnagogia and hypnopompia, you might be interested in this article on this site: https://aphantasia.com/article/stories/hypnopompia/
I wonder if the dichotomy between mental imagery and propositional thought is an incomplete representation of our mental processes. Why are these the only two possibilities? As a multi-sensory aphantasic, my sense is that there are other modes of "thought" going on in our brains. I was in my mid-thirties when I became aware that other people saw stuff in their mind's eye, while I did not. Before that, I'd had difficulty in various settings when I received specific instructions on what and how to visualize. I often felt frustrated, and nothing good happened. Once I became aware that I was different from most other people, I started handling these types of settings differently. Instead of trying to follow the directions exactly, I knew that I needed to do something a bit different. For example, during years of yoga classes with guided meditations at the end, I didn't try to picture anything. I took the input and thought about what it would feel like to experience whatever the described situation was. These thoughts were neither visual nor propositional. Other than the external words, few words and often none at all came into my mind. I just followed my feelings. When I didn't feel like following along with the prompts, I simply focused on how I was feeling in the moment, both physically and emotionally. For me, that does not require images or words, unless someone else asks me to describe what is going on. In order to engage other people more fully in these types of practices, it might be helpful for the practitioners to start from a broader set of instructions. Start with "thought" rather than "visualization" or other quasi-sensory modalities. We all think, even if we don't know exactly how we do it. Individuals can explore what that means for them. Maybe for most it involves visualization or other sensory imagination. Maybe for others it involves words. Maybe for others it is something else entirely different. If there is direction needed, it should start with how the individual can use their understanding of their thoughts to get to the next point of the practice. We don't know what other people's internal experiences are. It was reasonable for the author of this article to ask his daughter if she might experience more helpful results from HeartMath freeze-frame if she were using a mind's eye. But I think it would have also been reasonable for him to inquire if she felt that she got more quickly and fully to a helpful state because she wasn't distracted by visualization. Who is to say what the best route is for a helpful practice if a helpful result is achieved?
To answer Daisy's question : "how can you think about tip jars next to cash registers without some degree of visualization somewhere?" I wouldn't use the word visualization to describe anything that doesn't actually involve seeing something in your mind's eye. My imagination is spatial, not visual, and I don't think visualization is necessary to my imagination. I could even argue that, since a major use of vision itself is to help us navigate 3-dimensional space, visualization in someone's mind's eye is often related to some more fundamental spatial knowledge. Most of the evidence I've seen is that, when compared to the general population, people with aphantasia are not deficient in their sense of spatial relationships. We just have a different route to get through tasks that seemingly rely on visualization, at least from the perspective of visualizers. There are some interesting articles on this site about how much variability there is in how visualizers picture things in their minds eye. It's not one thing. For example: https://aphantasia.com/article/strategies/visualizing-the-invisible/ People with aphantasia may also have very different types of internal imaginations from each other, so I don't pretend to speak to anyone else's experience. This all may be a semantic distinction without much meaning. I can imagine where things are in space in relationship to each other and to me if I imagine myself to be in the same space. I can imagine properties of things that I do not imagine seeing. It's as though I have all of the information available to me that I would need to create some kind of mental visual image, but, since I don't do that, I don't think what goes on in my mind is at all the same as visualization, or even some kind of pre-visualization. I might as well ask, what happens in a visualizer's mind before their vision appears? Maybe it is similar to what happens in my mind, but maybe not.
How do we access the meanings of words? Great question! I'm not sure we can down to the root of the matter, since there are a lot of unconscious processes going on in our brains all the time. Let me start with your own description for the word "tip", which you describe as as an impression, which would be a picture, except that you have aphantasia. My experience might be similar (or not), except that I would describe tiny motions, such as the slight tilt of my head to one side when I read the text asking for an explanation of what went on in my mind as I thought of the meaning of "tip". I became much more aware of the role of small muscular contractions in my thinking when I first became aware that I had no mind's eye, about 35 years ago. I learned that, if I wanted to stay quiet, it was a good idea for me to sit on my hands. No hand motion, fewer words...but that may just be me. You may not experience anything like that at all. Then, since the right side of my computer screen showed a hat for sale (Aphantasia Merch!), I thought of the phrase, "to tip one's hat" which has both literal and figurative meanings. Associated with that came the sense of what it would be like to lift my hand to grasp the brim of a hat. And then, I thought about tip jars next to registers, and I wondered about why "tipping" means adding something extra to payment for service. No images, and no muscle movements either, for that one. Just a sense of where tip jars are generally located in commercial establishments, as well as where you add a tip on a credit card slip. So this last meaning was mostly associated with spatial relationships. My guess is that all of these impressions or even visualizations come after the mind has already accessed the meaning of the word, and that those manifestations are just a possible means of bringing that into consciousness, for words that are amenable to that kind of process. How would you manifest a more conceptual word, such as "inconceivable"? What would a visualization or impression even be? But I know the meaning of the word, and you probably do as well. So there have to be other processes involved in accessing the meanings of words, even if we aren't conscious of them.