Tony Jollans

With the exception of physical issues, blindness, deafness, and the like, I always assumed we all experienced the world in the same way. It may never have been stated explicitly, it was just understood and neither teachers nor parents gave any hint that it may not be so. My father’s red-green colour blindness was a bit of an outlier but I understood it to be physical and left it at that. Somewhere along the way I heard of synaesthesia, a concept so alien to me that I mentally filed it and thought little more of it. Then .. .. about ten years ago I learnt of what has come to be called aphantasia. I read an article in New Scientist that started by saying something along the lines of “Did you know some people don’t have a mind’s eye”. I, like others, I now know, had assumed that “mind’s eye” was nothing more than a figure of speech. Since then I have come to see almost everything through the lens of aphantasia. After seeing and reading presentations and having many conversations, all with ‘normal’ people, all I really know is that I’m human and we’re all different. I mentioned synaesthesia earlier but now that I know I don’t even have aesthesia, I understand why I found it alien. Awake, I sense nothing other than through my physical sense organs: asleep, I sense nothing at all, time just passes, what a waste. I have a superpower, my empty head. I know that I have it and recognise things about it: its benefits, certainly, although that is subjective, maybe its drawbacks although, subjectively again, I can’t really think of any – I would be a lousy witness to, say, a crime but is that a drawback or simply an observation?