Nancy Smith

I searched for "aphantasia" in my email to see what articles I have read and when. Apparently, I did read about the new term in June 2015 (in the "Picture This? Some Just Can’t" by Carl Zimmer), shortly after the name was coined. I saved it and forwarded a copy to my son (who does not have the problem) with some description of how I thought it applied to me as to the author in the article. Prior to that article, I had no idea that other people saw images rather than thought about them. I speculated to my son that perhaps it was related to my failure to "get" spatial relationships--I have to think to come up with which is left and right. I have always known this is not a problem for other people, who just know which way is left and which is right, who also come out of buildings and instinctively turn in the correct direction for their car, where I instinctively--I'd say 100% of the time--go the opposite way, making it not unknown but backwards! And I confuse many other such relationships, especially when stressed or busy. I don't remember if I paid a lot of attention after 2015 to now knowing about aphantasia, but I read more articles in 2023, and became very interested. My friend suggested that I could improve my image visualization if I tried, but I wasn't very successful, just more conscious. I am about to be 80 years old, have had very bad memory issues since I was in my 30s (prior to that I could remember every card in every Bridge hand and now I can't remember what is in one hand of Clue if I don't keep looking!), so that was a change, but I think that I've never had a particularly good memory for autobiographical and other events. A possibly relevant point is that I had parathyroid tumor surgery last year, where the surgeon was fairly sure that my tumor could be traced to radiation treatments (at age 6 months) to shrink my thymus. I won't give my opinion on the medical profession that did that to so many children in the 1940s just because they had colic--and it also caused me breast cancer in 1995 and 2001, which according to that surgeon was also definitely the result of the early radiation. The current surgeon also said that my problems with brain fog and kidney stones starting in my 30s and 40s could probably be traced back to the parathyroid which would have started about then (and not diagnosed for decades) as a result of the childhood radiation--so who knows about a memory connection. And then I had an experience today in 2025! I very recently started seeing an acupuncturist, which I'd never done before. He's an elderly gentleman like me, who is an MD, but focuses now solely on acupuncture with great results. Last week, we started on my memory, he sensed something that he could work on in my pulses and I actually noticed a small difference. This week, I realized that I should bring up my being aphantasic, and he had not heard of it--so got out his magnifying glass immediately and took a quick, very interested look. I mentioned how I was clearly having a problem as evidenced by my failing to see an apple, being at the bottom end of the spectrum w/no image at all. I was totally amazed when at the end of our session, he told me to keep taking the apple test until I see him again next week. I had no idea that he would immediately start working on that. Then I got home and did the Visual Imagery Questionnaire. GUESS WHAT! I've done that before, and never saw anything, but mental knowledge (not any images). Now I think I am indeed seeing something like a "vague image", but more importantly, I am not having the thoughts that I usually have instead of images. In the case of every question in that questionnaire, I found my brain working to see an image rather than piece together my thoughts about what I knew of it as I have always done. Having thoughts like: the sun is orange, it appears above horizon, happens in the morning, I can look from the front steps in SB over the buildings across the street, etc. which is very different from using one's vision to try to see the sunrise, without thinking of the characteristics--just seeing. Now I found myself actually looking to clarify a vague image of a sun coming up. Plus, when I tried to picture a color like blue (or the rainbow), I think it might have actually flashed up very briefly. Has anyone found acupuncture to be helpful in re-establishing brain connections?