Okay so wait a minute, with this aphantasia thing. I don’t think I have aphantasia because I process audio fine, in fact I prefer not to have any visual, but apparently there is some relationship between it and ADHD. I’m not trying to be confrontational in any of this but I’m bewildered by the idea of mentally picturing things you listen to or read about. It’s bothered me since I posted the ask.
I can picture things in my head, if I stop and make a conscious decision to build them, but if I’m doing that I can’t do anything else – I can’t listen to a podcast and picture it in my head and also do something with my hands. Come to think of it I probably couldn’t even keep up with the podcast if I was trying to picture it in my head, I’d struggle to choose which things to imagine and by the time I got them built they’d have moved on. It never feels like a very useful thing to do, because I’ve already got the words, that’s the important part, and I’d rather be doing stuff. I just assumed that most of the time when people talk about picturing stuff they’re either doing it very deliberately, like a guided meditation, or they’re being poetic, like people don’t actually do that, we just say we do as a way of describing someone thinking about something.
So, I’m listening to a podcast in which the host reads a letter from Napoleon Bonaparte to his brother, discussing his brother’s relationship with his wife (“she’s still young, let her dance if she wants, don’t lock her up with the kids all day.”) If you see images in your head when you hear audio, are you seeing the host reading off a sheet of paper, or Napoleon writing the letter, or Napoleon talking to his brother, or are you seeing Napoleon’s brother being mean to his wife? If you don’t know what any of these people look like, do you just make something up?
Jesus Christ, when people read erotica do they picture the sex happening? What’s that like? You just get porn in your head involuntarily? I mean, not involuntarily, you’re choosing to read the text, but it just shows up when you do?
Writers, when you write do you get mental images as you go? I often will pause in writing to build a mental image in my head and then describe it but as soon as I do it disappears, and it’s mostly a waste of time so I really only do that when I need to describe a space that people are moving around in (like the fishing lodge with the kitchen bar dividing the living room and kitchen, I do have several mental “camera snaps” of that setup, but I don’t picture it when I’m writing about it).
This might explain why I always get yelled at for not describing people in my books. It’s simply unimportant to me 99% of the time and awkward to try and insert it the other 1%. I don’t picture people in my head when I read – they’re a personality, a collection of characteristics. My characters don’t have faces to me, like how people in dreams don’t have faces, you just know who they are. I describe them but that’s just words I really like, or I pick out people who already exist and just say “oh they look like that”. Obviously when someone wants a description I do my best to supply it, but in prose it’s just not important.
This is genuinely blowing my mind. This is why people always want descriptions of things! They get to see the descriptions! Reading a book must be like going to an art gallery anytime you want without moving. Is that what it’s like? Is this super common, like am I the weird one, or is this just like for people with super vivid imaginations?
I ran into this when I became a high school English teacher! I had a lot of struggling readers and I have never struggled to read ever, so it was already hard, but in learning how to teach literature there was all this talk of the importance of visualization and “seeing it like a movie in your head” and I realized that I have never ever done that but I WAS supposed to teach these poor struggling teenagers how to do it and yeah…it was a rough first few years of teaching.
Anyway, I think we’re the weird ones, or at least the minority, but you’re certainly not alone
Yo, this is aphantasia. 100%. It can also be as extreme as not being able to imagine yourself in novel situations or not dreaming in images but only in thoughts.
