Thank you for your response.  I do appreciate knowing I am not alone in this.  I love your thoughtful response in regards to the limitations of empathy.  I have tried to address this topic with others, but was not so clear in my description.  People are so quick to assume that if you don't feel what other's are feeling then you must be some sort of psychopath, but that couldn't be further from the truth.  I desperately want people to be able to rise above their emotional states and see things with a more rational point of view.  I wish I could say that being honest and direct in asking questions about other's experiences has worked out better for me, but, in truth, it is the rare individual who can hear those questions and still see me as a friend.  Mostly my experience has been that such directness is viewed as an attack rather than a search for underlying truth.  

So interesting. I certainly am able to cry at a movie, but it's because I feel bad (or happy) for the person, I don't actually experience their emotions.  For example, I can be sad to see someone have their heart broken, but I don't experience the heart break myself.  If I cringe when someone gets hurt it's a reaction to seeing something shocking, not the visceral experience of feeling the pain the feel.   I just assumed that empathy required internal sensory imagination, but that does not seem to be the case you or Norma Jean.  You guys are blowing my hypothesis out of the water.

Fascinating.  So, when you say you experience other's pains viscerally you actually feel their pain as if it were happening to you?  You see someone grieving and you can feel grief, as if you've just lost someone you love,  not just understand that grief is painful?

I love this thread of conversation.  I first learned about Aphanatasia in 2015, the BBC had done a report on it and my mind was blown.  I had spent a good deal of my 20's involved in meditation groups and was always torn between being irritated at what other people were describing as multi-sensory experiences (because I really thought they were just full of b.s.) and worried that perhaps I had some horribly traumatic experience as a child that was causing this complete lack of that same experience.  I was SO relieved when I learned that it is generally a hereditary condition, and that my dad also has the same condition (we are both multi-sensory aphants).  However, I was also a little pissed off and feeling like I got the short end of the stick somehow.  It wasn't fair that the rest of the world had this super power to create worlds in their minds.  But, as time has gone on and I've been able to really examine my experience I've realized that a whole lot of people spend a lot of time, money, and energy to try and quiet their minds.  In other words, they are trying to have the experience that we were lucky enough to be born with.

Interesting, I never put those two ideas together.  I definitely find too much activity around me to be stressful and draining, even alarming at times.  For example, going to clubs where the music is loud or where I'm surrounded by a ton of people, is not fun for me, it puts me into a sort of survival mode.  I wrote it off as simply being an introvert, but you may have a point about the experience of excessive outward stimulation being just too much in contrast with my inner experience of quiet.  Thank you for the thought, it is something worth considering.

Oh, I am so sorry you have had tears around this.  My dad and I both have total multi-sensory aphantasia and we laugh how the only memories we have of our lives are the stories that have bee told about them.  I honestly could not tell you if what I remember happening actually happened or if it's just the story, or exaggeration, of an event and I really couldn't care less because the stories are all that actually matter. Ask yourself this, do you feel traumatized about not remembering things the way they actually were?  Or do you just feel bad because other people are hurt because you don't experience life the way they do?  What really is the issue here, are you upset because you don't feel upset or are you upset because other people are?  What would your life be like if you let go of other people's expectation about how you should feel? You know what has happened in your life, and you know what lessons were learned from the events and people who made lasting impressions, regardless of your ability to feel anything about their passing from your life.  You are blessed to be able to move forward with lessons learned without being chained to the memory.

Hey Juliet, I think that is a "safe" answer that people like to jump to because they can't believe it is totally normal to not be able to visualize things.  I would be willing to bet that if you started asking your family members you would find others in your tree that also have aphantasia.  When I started asking it turned out that my dad, and most of his side of the family have it, and all were shocked to hear that the majority of people on this planet are in fact being literal when they say they can see/hear/taste/feel/smell things with their minds.  Personally I think it is evolution at work and that if we start digging into our DNA we will find this condition can be traced back to a branch of the human family tree going back millions of years.

I agree with Hans in that your use of the word "cure" might be out of place.  I have weighed the pros and cons of being an aphantasiac and the pros outweigh the cons by a large margin.  The only possible reason I would give up our condition is for the idea that I might "see God" or feel the "Holy Spirit," because those things might inspire a greater depth of existence.  But, I've spent a great deal of time studying many spiritual traditions, and all of them seek to help people let go of their attachments to the past, or fantasies of the future.  So, really, they are all trying to be like us, so why on Earth would we want to "cure" ourselves of our condition?

I have tried hypnotherapy and it was a waste of time an money.  To be clear, the therapist I went to had an extensive background dating back to the 60's.  He founded many schools and was awarded several honors in his field of work.  But, he was utterly incapable of hypnotizing me because his techniques were all founded on visualization of as a means of pulling people deeper into their subconscious.  We tried several times and in the end, he wrote me off as being unwilling to participate in the process.  I wrote to several other hypnotherapists afterwards and was very upfront about my lack of visual experience, all of them wrote back saying their work depended on my ability to visualize and as such they would not be able to work with me.

This is something I spent YEARS wrestling with. Every spiritual guidebook or therapist tries to get you to dive in and reconnect with the feelings of your past trauma.  "Where do you feel it in your body,"  "How does that make you feel?"  Etc. etc. etc. Modern psychotherapy ASSUMES there is lasting trauma because most people continue to relive those experiences in their minds.  The greatest gift of aphantasia is that  we can look back upon our past traumas objectively and take from them learning experiences to move forward with. I know full well how I felt about the traumatic things that have happened to me in my life, and I am grateful that I no longer have the feelings that occurred at the time of the trauma.  The question you ask is "How do you heal from the trauma?" and the answer is you already moved on.  98% of the world do not move on the way we do, so the real question is are you really repressing or just being told that you are by people whose minds recreate their own traumas over and over and so cannot comprehend the idea that anyone else can just let go? Unless you are lashing out randomly at things that indicate a connection to past trauma, then I say stop listening to what the common experience is.  We are relieved of the work that most people have to do to let go of the emotions they attach to events.  Count your blessings, and be grateful.

Absolutley.  As a young person I wanted desperately to be a dancer, but learning choreography was painful to me.  The only way for me to learn was endless repetition, and I never could connect to the emotion behind the choreographed movement.  The only dance I could relate to was improvisation, because it touched with whatever I was feeling right then and there.  Once the movement and emotion were expressed, for lack of a better description, then it was done; to try and repeat it only resulted in shallow, hollow, mimicry.

I definitely relate to your sense of being able to know how I once felt in the moment, but in recollection the situation is more like someone else's story.  I do not physically experience past emotions from memory, and this is a highly unusual in regards to most people's experience.  I am in a study group now that focuses a lot on Buddhist theories, such as living in the moment.  The entire group goes on and on about how so many things trigger emotional and physical responses to past traumas and I am at a loss to understand. I have had trauma in my life, but when I recall it, it is like reading a story in the newspaper.  I do not suffer the sensations that most people suffer when their memories are triggered.  So, in way, it seems as if those of us with multi-sensory aphantasia have what others are desperately seeking.

So glad I came across this thread! Such a complicated topic.  Most of my life I considered myself to be mostly asexual, although that word never felt quite right.  The term demisexual is new to me, but after looking it up I would say that it definitely applies.  Basically, I'm only attracted to people I am emotionally bonded to, but it's very rare that I bond to anyone.  That's true even in terms of my friends.  I have to force myself to take interest in anyone that I'm not emotionally bonded to and it's super rare that I bond to anyone.  I should note here that I am a total multi-sensory aphant, Since learning about Aphantasia I have wondered about the connection between people's ability to bond with others and their ability to revisit their memories of people (or create fantasies) in their minds.  How much does the imagination reaffirm or strengthen people's feelings for others?

Definitely fiction.  For me reading is about the action and the plot. I find that the fantasy genre gives writers more opportunity to create an abundance of activity and wildly complicated plot twists, much more so than what you typically find in real life.

I have total Aphantasia, but a REALLY good sense of direction.  I used to go out in the woods for fun and try to get myself lost, but  it never took me long to find my way back to base camp.  However, trying to follow a GPS gadget makes my head spin and will turn me around completely.

I have been trying meditation for YEARS and get absolutely zero out of it as far as internal sensory experience of any sort.  I've also tried hypnosis, acid and mushrooms (once each was quite enough for me, thank you) and none of it had any effect on my minds eye.  The only effect the drugs had was to turn my inner dialogue on full steam for a relentless stream of thought that would not turn off for hours. I have heard of others like you who have had these things open up your minds eye, and others like me that do not have that experience.  It would be interesting to know why the difference in effect.

Hey Miko, What you describe is pretty much the norm for Aphantasia.  To briefly summarize what I've read, it's described like dreaming is from the bottom up, in that dreams come from the brainstem and make their way up into the visual centers of our brain.  But, conscious creation of imagery works from the top down, or from the Cortex down.  That's a really rough breakdown, and I encourage you to read more articles on the topic because you are definitely not alone in your experience.

Hello Christine! I too have had a similar experience upon waking.  It's rare, but on nights that I am having strong dreams from which I only partially wake I have been able to form images in my mind.  They are separate from the dream, but not exactly consciously created.  It's like being in a semi-conscious state for lack of a better description.  But, as soon as I fully wake the images disappear.

Hello Nicolas! To start I will say that I have what is currently termed as "Total Aphanatasia," meaning I have no imaginative sensory experience at all, no visualizations, sounds, smells, tastes, etc.  When I first learned about Aphantasia I called my parents and asked them if they could literally create images in their minds.  My dad replied in the negative and my mother replied in the positive.  After absorbing the shock of this revelation I asked my mom what her experience was and she described it as like having a polaroid image in her head, she even described the location of the image as being "forward" like right between her physical eyes.  Later I asked my sister, and she leans more towards the hypervisual in that she describes her internal imagery as being like a movie playing out, but with all the other senses involved to some degree (for clarification, I had not asked my parents about the other sensory experiences, just visual). The way you describe your experience is very similar to how my dad and I both experience it, all I "see" is blackness (or the back of my eyelids) however it is as if the image is there somewhere in the back of my head but it just won't come forward.  In regards to the other senses, I do not have that feeling that they are anywhere in my head. I hope that helps answer your question.

Thank you for your response.  I do appreciate knowing I am not alone in this.  I love your thoughtful response in regards to the limitations of empathy.  I have tried to address this topic with others, but was not so clear in my description.  People are so quick to assume that if you don't feel what other's are feeling then you must be some sort of psychopath, but that couldn't be further from the truth.  I desperately want people to be able to rise above their emotional states and see things with a more rational point of view.  I wish I could say that being honest and direct in asking questions about other's experiences has worked out better for me, but, in truth, it is the rare individual who can hear those questions and still see me as a friend.  Mostly my experience has been that such directness is viewed as an attack rather than a search for underlying truth.  

So interesting. I certainly am able to cry at a movie, but it's because I feel bad (or happy) for the person, I don't actually experience their emotions.  For example, I can be sad to see someone have their heart broken, but I don't experience the heart break myself.  If I cringe when someone gets hurt it's a reaction to seeing something shocking, not the visceral experience of feeling the pain the feel.   I just assumed that empathy required internal sensory imagination, but that does not seem to be the case you or Norma Jean.  You guys are blowing my hypothesis out of the water.

Fascinating.  So, when you say you experience other's pains viscerally you actually feel their pain as if it were happening to you?  You see someone grieving and you can feel grief, as if you've just lost someone you love,  not just understand that grief is painful?

I love this thread of conversation.  I first learned about Aphanatasia in 2015, the BBC had done a report on it and my mind was blown.  I had spent a good deal of my 20's involved in meditation groups and was always torn between being irritated at what other people were describing as multi-sensory experiences (because I really thought they were just full of b.s.) and worried that perhaps I had some horribly traumatic experience as a child that was causing this complete lack of that same experience.  I was SO relieved when I learned that it is generally a hereditary condition, and that my dad also has the same condition (we are both multi-sensory aphants).  However, I was also a little pissed off and feeling like I got the short end of the stick somehow.  It wasn't fair that the rest of the world had this super power to create worlds in their minds.  But, as time has gone on and I've been able to really examine my experience I've realized that a whole lot of people spend a lot of time, money, and energy to try and quiet their minds.  In other words, they are trying to have the experience that we were lucky enough to be born with.

Interesting, I never put those two ideas together.  I definitely find too much activity around me to be stressful and draining, even alarming at times.  For example, going to clubs where the music is loud or where I'm surrounded by a ton of people, is not fun for me, it puts me into a sort of survival mode.  I wrote it off as simply being an introvert, but you may have a point about the experience of excessive outward stimulation being just too much in contrast with my inner experience of quiet.  Thank you for the thought, it is something worth considering.

Oh, I am so sorry you have had tears around this.  My dad and I both have total multi-sensory aphantasia and we laugh how the only memories we have of our lives are the stories that have bee told about them.  I honestly could not tell you if what I remember happening actually happened or if it's just the story, or exaggeration, of an event and I really couldn't care less because the stories are all that actually matter. Ask yourself this, do you feel traumatized about not remembering things the way they actually were?  Or do you just feel bad because other people are hurt because you don't experience life the way they do?  What really is the issue here, are you upset because you don't feel upset or are you upset because other people are?  What would your life be like if you let go of other people's expectation about how you should feel? You know what has happened in your life, and you know what lessons were learned from the events and people who made lasting impressions, regardless of your ability to feel anything about their passing from your life.  You are blessed to be able to move forward with lessons learned without being chained to the memory.

Hey Juliet, I think that is a "safe" answer that people like to jump to because they can't believe it is totally normal to not be able to visualize things.  I would be willing to bet that if you started asking your family members you would find others in your tree that also have aphantasia.  When I started asking it turned out that my dad, and most of his side of the family have it, and all were shocked to hear that the majority of people on this planet are in fact being literal when they say they can see/hear/taste/feel/smell things with their minds.  Personally I think it is evolution at work and that if we start digging into our DNA we will find this condition can be traced back to a branch of the human family tree going back millions of years.

I agree with Hans in that your use of the word "cure" might be out of place.  I have weighed the pros and cons of being an aphantasiac and the pros outweigh the cons by a large margin.  The only possible reason I would give up our condition is for the idea that I might "see God" or feel the "Holy Spirit," because those things might inspire a greater depth of existence.  But, I've spent a great deal of time studying many spiritual traditions, and all of them seek to help people let go of their attachments to the past, or fantasies of the future.  So, really, they are all trying to be like us, so why on Earth would we want to "cure" ourselves of our condition?

I have tried hypnotherapy and it was a waste of time an money.  To be clear, the therapist I went to had an extensive background dating back to the 60's.  He founded many schools and was awarded several honors in his field of work.  But, he was utterly incapable of hypnotizing me because his techniques were all founded on visualization of as a means of pulling people deeper into their subconscious.  We tried several times and in the end, he wrote me off as being unwilling to participate in the process.  I wrote to several other hypnotherapists afterwards and was very upfront about my lack of visual experience, all of them wrote back saying their work depended on my ability to visualize and as such they would not be able to work with me.

This is something I spent YEARS wrestling with. Every spiritual guidebook or therapist tries to get you to dive in and reconnect with the feelings of your past trauma.  "Where do you feel it in your body,"  "How does that make you feel?"  Etc. etc. etc. Modern psychotherapy ASSUMES there is lasting trauma because most people continue to relive those experiences in their minds.  The greatest gift of aphantasia is that  we can look back upon our past traumas objectively and take from them learning experiences to move forward with. I know full well how I felt about the traumatic things that have happened to me in my life, and I am grateful that I no longer have the feelings that occurred at the time of the trauma.  The question you ask is "How do you heal from the trauma?" and the answer is you already moved on.  98% of the world do not move on the way we do, so the real question is are you really repressing or just being told that you are by people whose minds recreate their own traumas over and over and so cannot comprehend the idea that anyone else can just let go? Unless you are lashing out randomly at things that indicate a connection to past trauma, then I say stop listening to what the common experience is.  We are relieved of the work that most people have to do to let go of the emotions they attach to events.  Count your blessings, and be grateful.

Absolutley.  As a young person I wanted desperately to be a dancer, but learning choreography was painful to me.  The only way for me to learn was endless repetition, and I never could connect to the emotion behind the choreographed movement.  The only dance I could relate to was improvisation, because it touched with whatever I was feeling right then and there.  Once the movement and emotion were expressed, for lack of a better description, then it was done; to try and repeat it only resulted in shallow, hollow, mimicry.

I definitely relate to your sense of being able to know how I once felt in the moment, but in recollection the situation is more like someone else's story.  I do not physically experience past emotions from memory, and this is a highly unusual in regards to most people's experience.  I am in a study group now that focuses a lot on Buddhist theories, such as living in the moment.  The entire group goes on and on about how so many things trigger emotional and physical responses to past traumas and I am at a loss to understand. I have had trauma in my life, but when I recall it, it is like reading a story in the newspaper.  I do not suffer the sensations that most people suffer when their memories are triggered.  So, in way, it seems as if those of us with multi-sensory aphantasia have what others are desperately seeking.

So glad I came across this thread! Such a complicated topic.  Most of my life I considered myself to be mostly asexual, although that word never felt quite right.  The term demisexual is new to me, but after looking it up I would say that it definitely applies.  Basically, I'm only attracted to people I am emotionally bonded to, but it's very rare that I bond to anyone.  That's true even in terms of my friends.  I have to force myself to take interest in anyone that I'm not emotionally bonded to and it's super rare that I bond to anyone.  I should note here that I am a total multi-sensory aphant, Since learning about Aphantasia I have wondered about the connection between people's ability to bond with others and their ability to revisit their memories of people (or create fantasies) in their minds.  How much does the imagination reaffirm or strengthen people's feelings for others?

Definitely fiction.  For me reading is about the action and the plot. I find that the fantasy genre gives writers more opportunity to create an abundance of activity and wildly complicated plot twists, much more so than what you typically find in real life.

I have total Aphantasia, but a REALLY good sense of direction.  I used to go out in the woods for fun and try to get myself lost, but  it never took me long to find my way back to base camp.  However, trying to follow a GPS gadget makes my head spin and will turn me around completely.

I have been trying meditation for YEARS and get absolutely zero out of it as far as internal sensory experience of any sort.  I've also tried hypnosis, acid and mushrooms (once each was quite enough for me, thank you) and none of it had any effect on my minds eye.  The only effect the drugs had was to turn my inner dialogue on full steam for a relentless stream of thought that would not turn off for hours. I have heard of others like you who have had these things open up your minds eye, and others like me that do not have that experience.  It would be interesting to know why the difference in effect.

Hey Miko, What you describe is pretty much the norm for Aphantasia.  To briefly summarize what I've read, it's described like dreaming is from the bottom up, in that dreams come from the brainstem and make their way up into the visual centers of our brain.  But, conscious creation of imagery works from the top down, or from the Cortex down.  That's a really rough breakdown, and I encourage you to read more articles on the topic because you are definitely not alone in your experience.

Hello Christine! I too have had a similar experience upon waking.  It's rare, but on nights that I am having strong dreams from which I only partially wake I have been able to form images in my mind.  They are separate from the dream, but not exactly consciously created.  It's like being in a semi-conscious state for lack of a better description.  But, as soon as I fully wake the images disappear.

Hello Nicolas! To start I will say that I have what is currently termed as "Total Aphanatasia," meaning I have no imaginative sensory experience at all, no visualizations, sounds, smells, tastes, etc.  When I first learned about Aphantasia I called my parents and asked them if they could literally create images in their minds.  My dad replied in the negative and my mother replied in the positive.  After absorbing the shock of this revelation I asked my mom what her experience was and she described it as like having a polaroid image in her head, she even described the location of the image as being "forward" like right between her physical eyes.  Later I asked my sister, and she leans more towards the hypervisual in that she describes her internal imagery as being like a movie playing out, but with all the other senses involved to some degree (for clarification, I had not asked my parents about the other sensory experiences, just visual). The way you describe your experience is very similar to how my dad and I both experience it, all I "see" is blackness (or the back of my eyelids) however it is as if the image is there somewhere in the back of my head but it just won't come forward.  In regards to the other senses, I do not have that feeling that they are anywhere in my head. I hope that helps answer your question.