Jackie Buehring

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

I am 80 years old and aphantasia is relatively new to me. I always knew I was "different" but attributed to being an INTP on the Briggs-Meyers personality test. Like so many people who are aphantasic, I thought visualizing was just a figure of speech when people used it.