Richard Kleinbergs

"I started this comment on my phone 12 days ago, but my phone and this web site do not play well together. Hopefully my computer works better. I have read a lot of the comments on this site. I am amazed at the depth and variety of people's experiences with aphantasia. I end up with a lot of questions. It seems to me that people have many different experiences of aphantasia which makes me wonder if aphantasia is just a symptom of something more profound. I find many comments that I resonate with strongly. Others are completely outside my experience. Is aphantasia related to personality type? Before I found out that I have internal experiences different from most people, I attributed being "different" to testing as INTP on the Meyers-Briggs - another low probability state. I want to know much more about aphantasia and "abstract" thinking. Of the people I know that are aphantasic, the abstract thinking is the thing I most associate with them. Another question that comes to mind, the people I know with aphantasia are able to accept uncertainty and deal with it. Is it just random or is it related? As for me, to add my experiences to the discussion. Although I didn't know the word until I read The New Yorker magazine article, I had many indications that something was different. The usual "problems" - face recognition, memory, autobiographical details, being mystified when a meditation leader says to visualize my face, thinking the third eye was a metaphor even when it should have been obvious that people were actually seeing something... On the other hand, long before Oracle solved our data structure problems, it was clear to me that I "saw" how to create, manipulate, and solve problems with data structures better than even most of my nerdy peers. Likewise, I can "visualize" a network. From the late 70's I have never been able to understand how anyone could doubt the reality of climate change. I can "visualize" the little packet of energy heading out to space, being captured by an atom, and that little packet does not make it to space. I understand that measurements show that we are increasing those atoms of carbon in the atmosphere. I understand the calculations that show that this amount of carbon causes more energy to be retained on earth than the energy change that caused the ice ages. I "see" all of this so clearly that it seemed impossible that we wouldn't fix it. Now I understand many people don't "see" that way. They literally, not metaphorically "see". Likewise evolution makes sense in the same way. I took an Iyengar Yoga class twice a week for 18 years or so. I can remember the names of a couple poses. I should be able to remember all of them after all that. But I can remember how to get in and out of the poses. I think in sentences, but it is not like hearing. I volunteer in a prairie project. Some of my peers remember the scientific names of dozens and dozens of plants. I am lucky to remember the common names of a few. But "seeing" the prairie outside of the immediate sensation of physically looking at it, I think I "see" it differently than most of them do. I think of it more as the concept of a prairie with all that entails rather than the picture of the prairie. I used to play bridge occasionally. At the beginning of a hand I would think it through. More than once, I had my strategy. Problem solved. My mind goes on to something else, and it comes time to actually play the cards. The strategy was gone. Either try to recreate it on the spot, or just play something, anything. One more anecdote. I am part of a book group of over 50 years. With most of the group present on New Years Eve, I asked people to visualize the apple. It turns out 6 out of 10 of us can't see the apple or anything else at all. One is superphantasic and we all want to be on her team playing Trivial Pursuit. I was not surprised at any of the results. It makes for interesting book discussions. Lots of personal experiences, theories, concepts. Much different that other book discussions I have been in. I see that some people here think of aphantasia as a problem or a deficiency. I don't think of it at all that way. It's just a different way of being. Our differences come in many dimensions, some of which we know and probably others of which we have no clue. I would not trade what I have for the ability to see images. On"

"Until last year, I was convinced everyone was lying when they were saying that they could picture things in their minds (for example in primary school when we would do relaxation exercises asking us to ''picture ourselves on a beach'' and the likes). I never once thought I was the one that was different. It is also quite strange, because I consider myself to be a very imaginative person - I love to write, I played-pretend a lot when I was a kid, I had lots of ''imaginary friends'' that I actually could not see (now I wonder if my friends who also had those were able to see them or not), etc. In recent years, I started reading a lot of fantasy, which is probably my favorite hobby at the moment. I cannot picture anything at all when I read (or in general, my score is 16), and I absolutely need music to feel immerse in the world I am reading about. Last year, I saw an Instagram video of a person saying how amazing it is to read and to picture everything you see on the page, then it was pictures of fanart from some books. Someone commented that it sounds lovely, but some people cannot picture anything in their heads. I looked through the comments and realized that most people did not understand how not being to picture things was possible. And then, I knew. I googled. I asked my friends and family to answer this question I had taken for granted with the upmost sincerity. I realized I had lived in a bubble, and then I got very sad. Some people can see things? They can picture someone's face, relive memories in their heads (I narrate them), even hear someone's voice? They see movies in their heads when they read? I can't. It felt like I was grieving. I kept thinking that when the people I love ultimately leave this world, I would forget them. I won't be able to see their faces in my head or hear their voice, I won't be able to picture how they walked or acted. It broke my heart. At the same time, it also made me understand why I am so terrible at remembering faces or people I've met. I've always felt so guilty when someone would come up to me with a smile, say my name, and I would just stay there awkwardly. Or why I often can't follow the plot of movies\series with lots of characters - they all look the same, it takes me ages to finally be able to tell them apart. The only positive thing about this, so far, is that I seem to be able to forget people I want to forget with great ease. I was discussing with a close friend who recently went through a break up, she said it was horrible because she kept having all these ''movies'' of beautiful memories with her ex. She couldn't control them, and it made the break up much harder for her to go through. I never had to deal with this, breakups are awful, but they never were that bad to handle. Trying to see the positive in all this..."

"I do not think I ever really thought about the issue in these terms; since I am already neurodivergent in other ways, I just assumed that this might be part of it, or that it was the same for other people, or something like that. I think I only realised it when I first read about aphantasia as a newly defined symptom on BBC or some other mainstream media outlet. I _had_ previously heard about the fact that some people have an inner voice and some don't – “(an)endophasia” if you wan to look it up –, but never extended that to images. For the record, I _do_ have an internal monologue – is there any data on correlation between (an)eendophasia and aphantasia?"

"There was a Facebook post a few years back by a Silicon Valley software engineer who described aphantasia and how it blew him away to discover it. My wife actually sent that post to me with the line "Read that .. I think that is you. " ... my mind was blown. All of a sudden my life started making sense. Why i was useless when my wife sent me to the store to get paint in the color of our living room. Why i can watch horror movies all day long and not get nightmares. Why i settled on an entirely black wardrobe years ago. Why i was never able to create cool looking slide decks at work. Why, even though I'm an absolute cinephile, i found it impossible to imagine a movie of my own. It was a revelation."

"I've always had Aphantasia.I was so frustrated when I was young because I would try to explain that I didn't see pictures when I closed my eyes, and I was told I was wrong. That of course I did. I was asked if I dreamed. And yes I have vivid dreams in color. But then I would be told if I closed my eyes I'd see the same types of images as my dreams. When I said that wasn't so, they would reiterate that something I was experiencing wasn't true- it messed with my self esteem and my own self-validations.I never daydreamed. I can't daydream because I can't picture the process of what those daydreams would be. Again I was told that of course I had day dreams- again another truth I was living being told it wasn't so. I can't just sit and listen to music. I can sing and I can dance along with music, but just sitting there listening to music is incredibly boring to me.In talking with friends they visualize and daydream when they listen to music. My self esteem when it comes to my looks ( American woman- oy vay!) is always based on how I feel not on how I look , I think that is because there isn't some perfect image of myself in my minds eye...as I don't have a minds eye." When I feel good I look in a mirror and see a pretty lady and when i feel bad I look in the mirror and see an ugly/fat/whatever gal. When it comes to members of the opposite sex their looks mean very little as I can't really remember what they look like. I used to have a friend in my teens who hated that I could never tell her the eye color of the latest crush I had. I also have a dear friend from my youth who is a fashion designer and it drives him nuts that I never remember any outfits unless it was something we took a picture of.When things were difficult someone suggested meditation and the amount I hated it surprised everyone who knew me. I believe now that seeing thing in your minds eye is a necessary part of the meditative process. One that I am woefully unable to do. It was suggested over and over and until I knew the word and definition and reality of aphantasia.As we devolve into turbulent times I find the lack of truth clicks into the sense of reality, or lack thereof that I had growing up with this. It's being told over and over that something that is happening to you , cannot be happening to you that really messed with my head in this journey."

"There are two points in my life i could pull up equally here, so i'll do just that. First, when i was a child, my parents took me to a hypnotist, i dont remember what they tried to achieve, but i remember one thing: the hypnotist told me to visualize a red ball rolling up a hill, i asked her «What do i do if i cant see the ball?». However this wasnt really the awakening, as i didnt think much of it afterwards. The second one was when discussing imagination with some people on discord, i was already aware of the word aphantasia, and said that i had it, but thats the first time i realized how most people think, they said they could literally, not figuratively, see everything they thought of as like another layer of reality. Thats the first time i heard what people mean by visualization, it sounded like a superpower to me honestly, i still cant believe it is THE NORM! Hallucinating at will? How?! The weirdest part of my experience, to me at least, is that i can make complex «images» full of detail, both abstract and not, then manipulate them like a god, but i am not able to see these things myself? I can make a guy kick the sun out of the sky, but i am not allowed to see it? Its honestly a bit unfair. Most of my thoughts are what others would call an inner voice (just without a single sound), my thoughts often consist of words, but i can freely switch between the invisible images and the soundless words, its weird, very weird."

"I'm 49 Years old from Sydney Australia. I work as a professional Photographer & Videographer (surprise). Last week I was meditating and the instructor on my App said "Imagine a Re Rose in full detail, the petals the different hues of red, etc." And then went on to say "really imagine it like you can actually see it in front of your eyes. Like you can touch it." And I thought surely this is a joke. No one can do that. You don't actually see things when you imagine something. You grasp the concept and have an understanding of it but actually visualising. No way. So I asked family and friends and all of them said that yes they could actually visualise when prompted to imagine a Rose, All of them in varying degrees. Then I described what I am experiencing to AI and asked what's wrong with me and that's how I landed here... Still stumped, but I am slowly wrapping my head around it. A lot of my life and my choices in life make a lot more sense now. Like why I was drawn so much to photography. I'm not really grieving, just absolutely fascinated by it all. I wonder if there are any traits that Aphantasts have in common. Thank you so much for this website, it is a massive help for me in navigating my way through this."