Amit Khanna

What a great question, and an amazing number of responses. I identified it when I was around 20 during one of those visualization relaxation activities. Like so many other people on this forum, I found it UN-relaxing and when I mentioned this to my fellow-participants (I recall we were all training to become residence advisers at my college), they were baffled, and I was baffled by their bafflement.  Since then I have had many of the other experiences outlined by forum participants here to confirm that this is true, and then I read something Oliver Sacks wrote and felt validated because there have always been people who just did not believe this was even possible (my wife for example is still dubious).

Sounds like my own experience exactly

This happens to me all the time also: "As soon as calm returns, the negative thoughts and feelings immediately come to the fore again."

Hi Marcin (lovely name) and Joe, What I love about this forum is reading (for the very first time in my life) experiences that I can connect to, words that make me say "yes, YES, I have that also). Of course we are all individuals, so not everything connects. For example, I love reading, Marcin and something about the words by themselves, even though I cannot convert the words into pictures. But I think it was more because reading was my way out of loneliness, which I always felt for many of the reasons you both describe. I especially connected to Marcin's line about being forgiving and Joe, I too cannot ever recall a sentence someone says with any accuracy. I cannot tell you how this has driven my wife and son completely mad. They consider it a sign that I do not care that I cannot even repeat what they just said to me 5 minutes ago. 

Interesting ...I replied to this post a few weeks back and said I was unsure of sound/hearing. Since then I have chatted with my son who says he can definitely hear  "voices in his head" when he has conversations with himself. I definitely do not.

Would love to respond to this by raising a question for everyone in the forum ...have you watched this talk and what does it say to you? https://www.ted.com/talks/gina_gutierrez_the_link_between_sex_and_imagination/transcript Do you think "yeah, I can totally do that because the stories would activate something" or are you thinking "this would never work because step one requires images". 

I dream visually, but dreams that lack such imagination ...my dreams are various repeats of my everyday life with subtle changes that indicate my hopes and fears. I think I posted elsewhere that I once awoke with a smile on my face because I dreamt that the bathroom had been retiled ...

I cannot smell or taste things in my mind, for sure (wait! can anyone?), but I am unsure of the hearing sounds. I thought I could hear music in my head, but definitely not with the clarity others can (which explains partly my tunelessness) in a way described in Steven Hamilton's question to another post. 

An excellent question as a teacher of final year International Baccalaureate ( a bit different from your Upper Sixths),  I would love to know the answer myself. But as a self-identified aphant, I would encourage the following a) as for all students, remind this student that exploring his own learning style is worth the time. While so many students now fall for the "I am a visual learner" trap, he should make a very serious attempt to note where/how he learns best in each subject. For example, I learned despite all research indicating that this is not a useful study technique for most students, I excelled in Biology by re-writing notes. Of course, all of this has side-stepped your query about "training out there or books/articles you can recommend". b) Counterintuitively, making diagrams has always worked for me in all subjects. Perhaps the act of making the diagrams for someone who cannot for images is a struggle, and the struggle itself resulted in longer-term learning. So I diagram out everything (including my own lesson plans today) even though I do not think in diagrams.  c)  I think this is the really tough bit ...I never found it hindered academic progress in any subject, but it has affected how i make plans (He may need to plan every step rather than focusing on the final goal). So in other words, allow him to build on details.  Finally (unrelated to your question, but may be relevant in other domains as he goes into higher education), this has affected how I respond to people/ groups (finding it hard to visualize their emotions and reactions). Oddly, this makes people think I work well with others, because I end up not expressing my own emotions because I cannot imagine how they will respond. But helping him deal with visualizing emotions may be the greatest help you can give him

Hello and thanks for responding to me, but I do not know how to respond to a response (there is no reply to Roberto Rojas" arrow below your most recent response), so apologies if this is not the correct way. That is an very interesting point about perceived callousness. That is exactly the dissonance I am struggling with, and had not made any connection to the aphantasia I have been aware of of decades (although I only started using the term more recently).

Another fascinating thread for aphants (did not know that was the cool way to refer to us until today). My contribution is only this. I do feel fairly definite I dream in images (different parts of the brain, I think) because when I wake up I feel (?) like I saw things. I know that is hardly convincing. But to add to someone else's response, what I do know is that I very rarely have the kinds of "crazy" dreams that other people. Mine are so mundane that they are laughable ...I once woke up with intense pleasure because the bathroom floor had been re-tiled in my dreams, another time I dreamt that the sugar was finished. Wild things! Most mornings, if I do have a vague recollection of my dreams, it is that I had a dream of something that could very easily have happened in my everyday life.  On the plus side, I have also never had an erotic or racy fantasy/dream. I once woke up with the vague recollection of the naked shoulders of  the first girl I kissed ...Wait,I am not sure how that is a plus?

This is my first day on this forum, and as I have written elsewhere, I feel like I am finally reading experiences i can connect to. What you describe is my emotional response in every way ...I neither feel the negative nor the positive for that long. Did not connect it to aphantasia, but reading https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2021.0267 and other posts has made me reconsider my entire emotional response range (quite limited according to my wife and son)

Hello Edward and thanks so much for posting this. I have just discovered this forum today and for the first time I am reading things that make me say "THAT is me" ...as in quite literally I tell my experience about discovering I had aphantasia (years before I had the word for it) as "I assumed it was a figure of speech" when people asked me to picture things. (On a side note, I often see words ...do others?). But also other responses to your post such as feelings being there without the visual component, and feeling slightly blessed that some images cannot get stuck in my head.  There is one kind of image that has an immediate and very profound effect on me ...although luckily it does not stay. Any kind of medical or hospital video/image and I am likely to feel intensely queasy and dizzy. 

I am on this site because this is what I have been wondering about a lot recently. Because of my tendency to bawl my eyes out in the same situations you described (The movie  I am Sam, the book The Kiterunner) I did not consider myself unemotional or unempathetic. As a teacher, my students refer to my generous heart. But a recent repeated episodes with my wife and adult son who are stupefied at my lack of empathy for them, as in I cannot seem to be able to name their emotional, predict their responses, anything beyond what they call highly "robotic" responses. Like you, I know I should be able to do something, but at this stage it appears to wrecking my 30 year marriage.