Anton Nannestad

Hi Eric, I did tag you in my introductory post today, and that was because your chess match description sounded very similar to how my mind seems to function. I do hope that's OK by you. Anton

Greetings! How did I first discover aphantasia - well now, today, I discovered aphantasia.com by accident! (Attempts at humour aside), I never realised that I had it. I suspect there are two reasons for this. First of all, I never realised that other people could visually imagine a representation. Second, I thought my difficulty in recognising faces of people I knew and linking their name to the face were simply just that. I was diagnosed as a high functioning autistic person in my late fifties, and found that to explain a lot. It has only been a couple of more recent conversations where the awareness that other people could create a visualisation in their mind and describe it, that raised a suspicion for me. I didn't go looking for aphantasia.com however - rather the website appeared in a search for something quite unrelated that I was researching. As I read, and then tried the examples, I couldn't "see" anything. As I read some other comments, I see some similarities. I have no childhood memories in any "visualisation" I simply can identify that X happened at Y time in my childhood. When I look at photographs, they do not evoke memories as a visualisation of any kind. For instance I look at photographs of my long-dead parents, and it is not linked to emotional affect, but I can affirm that this is them. I'm curious to learn more and probably to discuss this with a neurologist in due course to see what he thinks. And yes, I'm a knowledge hound so I downloaded all the studies on the website to read at leisure. The big insight for me is that I couldn't ever understand why it was that I couldn't draw other than stick persons, although I could create complex tabular diagrams of phenomena linked in categories of features - what I mean here is abstract concepts which had a bunch of specific tagged features - say a company which made widgets, used components purchased from companies in three or four other countries, assembled them in a fifth country and exported them from that country to their various subsidiaries around the world. I "made it up" as a diagram on a white board developed "on the fly" not from a mental visualisation, but linked by abstract tags of some kind, like volume, production or distribution cost etc. At some level, I believe my brain had clearly organised this data in some fashion, but subconsciously. I'd liken it to the way Eric Pazandak talks about his chess playing experience in a comment on today's page. When I read it there was some spark of recognition!! I'm looking forward to finding out more and so I joined this Community.