Joshua Martin

response You made me laugh, several times, at our similarities. First I’ll get the quick aphantasia-party handshaking, get to know you stuff out of the way, then I’ll address some of your questions based on my experience. So, I started listening to a podcast about inner monologue back in June of this year and suggested video thumbnail asked the question something like, “Do you see pictures in your mind?” or something to that effect and I had the immediate thought of, “Uh, of course not! Nobody sees actual images.” and then the very quick follow up thought of, “Oh shit! You’ve got to be kidding me! People see ACTUAL PICTURES in their mind and I don’t, do I?!” It was that moment, sweating away, painting trim in some random garage when I realized a side quest had officially been unlocked. I’m a near full sensory Aphantasic. (Aphantic? I always stumble over what I should say there.) While all of my other sense remain fully externalized and in the exact moment that I am experiencing them, I do have sound - and most specifically, words. A constant - unyielding - as far back as I can remember - tonally perfect - stream of words. I’m not talking about the sound version of a photographic memory. I forget almost everything unless I apply an extreme amount of effort (it seems, at least). What I’m talking about is every single word I think is spoken in my voice in my head. If another person is speaking in my head, I can hear that too. I can’t remember the exact words that someone spoke to me, but if I put words in their mouth in my head I can hear it in a perfect representation of their actual voice. Besides that, total black screen. (In the interest of full disclosure, I do sometimes get a very hazy, orange hued, outlined version of a mental image right before I drift off to sleep, like the 20 or so seconds before completely sleeping and usually only after I’ve had too much coffee and am simultaneously completely overtired and needed adequate sleep like 6 years ago but again, I’m also compensating with caffeine so my brain and my body are fighting each other. The point is, it does happen to that miniscule extent.) Dreams are a whole new ball game. I dream in the most agonizingly vivid, richly contoured, profusely visual and hyper realistic, somatic experience that I have routinely confused what was real life and what was dream, even embarrassingly late into life. Interestingly, though, without sound! Not entirely, random sounds do sometimes register, but usually only in moments when I am dreaming of extreme tension or violence. In my dreams, people frequently don’t move their (or even sometimes have) mouths. When they do speak to me, it’s like it registers in my brain like telepathy. But that’s all just for free on the side of our actual topic, daytime aphantasia, and I only mention it to express my own version of something I detected in your story, that “What the hell is wrong with me?” kind of freak out moment … It’s not just you. I’m only just now stabilizing from my own mental tail spinning. Anyway, I digress … the TL;DR is I don’t have internal senses, my dreams are crazy, and when I talk about how things are actually kicking around upstairs people usually look at me like they’re surprised I’m able to function as well as I can in modern, polite society. I laughed out loud when I saw you A) deciphering these ideas with chatGPT, and B) describing yourself as a Dialogicist because A) I TOTALLY relate, and B) instead of an inner experience dominated by verbal dialogue and conceptual thinking, my inner experience is dominated by a monologue and conceptual thinking. I am inherently a language processor. I store nodes of key:value pairs, like a dictionary (the computer science data structure), as nodes and combine nodes into broader concepts of semantic meaning. When a picture is worth a thousand words, but you can’t store the picture in your mind, you’re condemned to store the thousand words or forget it entirely. That’s my brain, in a nutshell. I try to write down as much as I possibly can - or it’s like it never happened. I review my notes and it’s like, “Oh yeah, I did that thing. That’s right ….” I definitely qualify as having a Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory. My wife has sometimes grown frustrated and commented that I exist ‘only in the moment’, but it’s literally because I can’t remember 80% or more of what happened and I can’t visualize the future. I have what I have, and it’s basically what’s happening right now and I simply feel how I feel about it. Which, thankfully is usually pretty positive, can-do, and optimistic - unless of course I get frustrated with something and for whatever reason my words fail to be heard or won’t make a difference, and then all that’s left is the knuckles and grunt-growling like The Hulk. I feel you, is what I’m saying there. My words are important to me. Language is important to me. Grammar is important to me, because it affects meaning, and for anything to be meaningful at all to me it has to be spoken, and spoken deliberately, with intention and clarity. Which is also why I laughed hard enough for my wife to re-enter the room and stare at me before I could re-center, sheepishly cover my mouth in mock shame, and apologize for frequently diverting an argument into a semantic side argument about a word or tone instead of arguing about what the actual argument is about! Again, I feel you. So, with that amount of sympathetic understanding in just a few paragraphs, I took it to heart - I’m telling you, I understood (I wish I could say I felt it, but I would only be speaking metaphorically, and in this context it would only be confusing) - I’m saying I got! You NEED to know, and do, too …. so I’ll attempt to share more of my experiences or understanding and in the very least, maybe you can gain a little perspective. I’m going to approach this systematically, because there’s a lot here, and it all feels important. Tell me how your inner dialogue works. Do you think in conversations also? No, all monologue. It’s my thoughts, my words, my feelings, my perspective - all the time. I can not simulate another person’s perspective with my imagination. At best, while physically writing, and with great revision and editing I can approach such a task, but more as a novelist might and not as someone who might be laying in bed, outwardly appearing to fall asleep but is really just quietly, internally rehearsing an argument with their spouse over their spouse’s continued use of the ridiculously amateurish and demonstrably incorrect use of the crushing-monkey-fist technique for dispensing tooth paste. I’m a pure monologic logocentrist. Maybe just sometimes? No, never. How do you overthink? By over processing or over communicating. It never feels like “over thinking”, it just feels like thinking, but I do recognize at a fairly frequent interval that someone has checked out of the conversation and I think to myself, ‘I’ve exceeded their attention span for this topic.’ What do you think about? How do you think about it? I think about everything! I don’t usually pontificate with myself, I’m not a philosopher. I don’t usually prompt myself with questions, though some times I do but it feels unnatural. It’s more like I guide my canoe like a naturalist down along a sometimes tranquil and sometimes turbulent current in my ever present stream of consciousness. Do you have to fill in the response because you know nothing will respond? Do you get a response? If so what form; Sound, thought, concept? When you get a song stuck in your head what do you "hear"? Every note, inflection of voice, missed beat, and Jagger step. Do words matter to you, and if so how much; Uhhh …. it should be pretty obvious at this point that, to me at least, words matter quite a bit. When in debates or arguments do you ever find yourself arguing about the semantic of a word instead of what the argument was even about? Only like every time - and only because the person I’m arguing with made use of a specific word, tone, or level of voice that conveyed a meaning that is hurtful, harmful, unproductive, or derailing in some way and when asked if they actually meant that doesn’t see the hidden meaning, refuses to acknowledge their verbiage, tone, or level of voice and either stand by it or take it back so we can go on with our actual argument. No, instead, of legitimately debating the merits of one method of dispensing tooth paste over another, they want to denigrate the argument into grade school level name calling and say I’m handling the tooth paste ‘like a toddler’ and then act like I’m ridiculous for receiving that as an insult when they really only meant that I was handling the toothpaste ‘in a somewhat immature or kinesthetically rudimentary fashion’. No, you said toddler, and you left that word underdeveloped if you meant differently - and no, I’m not being defensive about the the way I dispense the toothpaste, I’m appropriately addressing the fact that calling a grown ass man a TODDLER would be offensive to anyone including yourself, if the rolls were reversed ………. Throughout history, of people who did the worst atrocities, how many had aphantasia? Uhh, I would say it doesn’t matter. I don’t think Hitler or Chairman Mao cared about what they did enough for it to bother them whether they could recall the visual image of their action or not. I will say that I believe there is a benefit to the aphantic (that’s it, I’m going with aphantic) trauma survivor, though. Do people on the other side of aphantasia with mainly vision, have less of an inner voice, which means less of a conscience. Do they not have a Jimmy Cricket in their head? I won’t go into dogmatic detail here, though I believe I could, but I will say that brain scan studies of psychopaths (people with no consciences) depict abnormalities in the structure and resulting function (ie emotional control, decision making, and even empathy) of their prefrontal cortex. That knowledge could be construed as troubling. Is my prefrontal cortex fully functioning if I can’t see mental imagery? My reply to that thought (especially as a diagnosed 99th percentile, card carrying member of the ADD of the month club) is the subsequent thought that, while my prefrontal cortex isn’t operating in a divergent manner, it’s not to the extent that I have lost the ability to empathize. A psychopath can not change, they are too far down that road. If they could change, they’d be referred to as a sociopath, and with lots of effort and enough give-a-shit they could actually improve their relationships How much do you think this affects the 6 personality types (Alpha, Beta, Sigma, Gamma, Delta, Omega) when developing? Specifically when developing? Hmm, good question. It seems a lot like asking if life imitates art or if art imitates life, but I would say the answer to both is, yes - but it’s dynamic and complicated. I’m a Sigma. More specifically, I’m an ISFJ Sigma. I was a quiet kid for a number of reasons, some nature, some nurture. Both terms are labels we assign to pre-existing conditions so that we can effectively discuss them. Thus, I can absolutely see how the constant stream of thought in the form of language provided a method for amusing myself in quiet times, allowing me to grow more comfortable in it than I might otherwise have become if not so equipped. But I can also see how someone with a mind’s eye could respond to my same times of contemplative solitude by playing 18 holes of golf in their head. Are the best leaders dialogue, or vision based? I hate to say it, but the person who thinks like most people is going to be more successful at leading most people. But that is absolutely NOT to say that aphantasia limits our leadership abilities to any insurmountable extent. But, realistically, I routinely have to scaffold my communication with something actually communicable to most people. Since about 90% of the population has the ability to use both, why does 60% seem to favor image? Another good question! I’d say that a picture is worth a thousand words and that carrying all those words in place of a simple picture is cognitively stressful and taxing. When def people read sign language, does it also produce images? 🤯 Got some theories on how aphantasia might be an aspect in autism? I am not autistic. I am however very ADHD. In fact, I’m so ADHD that I would rather just say ADD. Growing up in the 80’s with a clinically diagnosed ‘autistic’ cousin, to me autism had always been quantified by the inability to function independently. Yet, these days there are a lot of folks functioning just fine -if not more better than many, quite frankly - independent of any meaningful auxiliary support with what I do believe they are calling Level 1 autism. Having seen the list of characteristics once myself, I did some preliminary research and determined that there are a lot of overlap between Level 1 autism and ADD, and I have NO IDEA how aphantasia is reflected in that Venn diagram. What impact did my inner dialogue have on my narcissism? Did you recede into your mind instead of engaging with people? My feeling is that narcissism is a function of empathy and training. Some people just don’t care that they have hurt you, while others simply aren’t aware because they haven’t been properly trained for what is appropriate. If a person cares about their relationships, and is closely engaged in those relationships, not avoiding conflict, I think it could be argued the probability of their becoming a narcissist id diminished. But people who avoid relationships, like perhaps someone who has the ability to engage in less threatening or taxing relationships by way of the imagined dialogue of their mind, might skew to the side of not experiencing other people’s needs enough while growing up to notice or value other people’s needs when they are confronted with them later in life. Maybe?? Similar question string for confidence, empathy and so on. With a congruent answer. How imaginative do you consider yourself? Rather, actually. I make art, I build things, I invent, I consider, I notice, I have wonder, I experiment …. just not with an accompanying mental image. What are you thankful for? Another good question. I mean, yeah it’s Thanksgiving time, but the greater context is ‘what about aphantasia am I thankful for?’ and the answer is that I’m grateful that I’ve had to adapt. It’s made me a better person. Like someone who cannot see might develop better hearing (I saw video recently where this one blind guy is using clicks of his tongue to echo locate his surroundings!), I have had to develop different skills, and some of them have served me well. In the end, I am what I am and I don’t always like it, but I don’t know that I’d really change it that much. The old saying is, “If all our problems were hung on a line, you’d choose yours and I’d keep mine.” It’s fine if you feel spun around by the realization that you don’t think like most people. That’s understandable. Just don’t misconstrue either as better or worse - they’re just different, and difference not only makes the world interesting, it adds to the collective capability of humanity. So take what you’ve got, however much or little, however different or the same, and do not go gentle into that good night!