Sharon Woodhouse

Just learned that the condition I described to endless doctors post-concussion (and it seemed many thought I was imagining, exaggerating, malingering, whatever) was aphantasia. I eventually regained my ability to visualize 22 months after the concussion, four months after doing daily vision exercises prescribed a functional neurologist. The aphantasia affected my sense of self (often thought of myself in the 3rd person and when dealing with my son's emotions, I learned to think rationally, "what would Sharon do?"), my 360-degree sense of the world around me (the sense of "eyes in the back of my head"), my ability to meditate (felt I couldn't "sink" into my normal groove, could not "tune in" to myself), my meta-cognition/thinking about thinking, and my ability to move around and consciously store/recall information in my head. I could read the same books but it was enjoying one line at a time, very present tense then gone, no sense of integrating what I was reading with existing knowledge though I could recall later in a conversation. It felt that I had to process the world through my right ear and I had to physically lean to my right to understand. Eventually I learned that talking to myself in my head helped a little. Since the eye exercises, it feels that everything is back at least 85-90% of my prior normal.