Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind

May I ask if you feel embarrassment when you think about an embarrassing event in your past?

The adjustment is quite an odd feeling. I use mostly the same language to describe things as other people. I will use terms like 'mental image' or 'yeah i can see you wearing that', but to me it was far more metaphorical. I had the same realization about counting sheep. Now I feel a bit uncomfortable when I use some terms. I'm used to using them but that was when I thought everybody else was using them in the same way as myself.

I had wondered if the Text popups in the TV series Sherlock came from someone with without aphantasia trying to understand a description given by someone with aphantasia. I could describe what I 'see' when I think about something as a cloud of facts relating to the subject, If someone who inherently thought of such things visually tried to interpret my viewpoint I could quite easily understand how they end up with the effect used in Sherlock. It's not what I see of course. I don't see words floating in space. I see nothing. To some the idea of not imagining things visually must seem just as impossible.

I think it's different to imagination though, I can't visualize but I can imagine.

I tried this experiment:

Imagine two identical closed cardboard boxes. In one of them there is a duck.

I can't see the boxes but I can imagine them, and the box with a duck in it is distinctly different to the one without. My friends say they can visualize the boxes and they do indeed look identical, but strangely they still seem to know which one the duck is inside.

Yes, although I don't think I was able to "see" things in my head before or after. I got West Nile Virus about 10 years ago, and was physically out-of-commission for most of a year. The particularly disturbing part was that even after I recovered physically, it took several more years before I recovered my mental ability well enough to reason about anything complex -- like math, or code. I just couldn't follow equations that once made sense.

Now after a decade, I think I'm back to about 80-90% of peak. I don't know if the small decline is residual from the West Nile, or to be expected with normal aging from 35 to 45. The experience drove home how little we understand the brain, or viruses. Consider how primitive our understanding of medicine was 100 years ago. I think it's likely that 100 years forward they'll look back at now with similar disdain: "They didn't understand anything --- they just let viruses run their course and do their damage!"

Every now and then, I'll forget a word in English but remember it in another language. My internal monologue tends to be English-ish (especially right now, when I'm composing a post), but if the sounds for a word are missing, the concept will fill its place...or sometimes the closest equivalent of whichever language I've been thinking about lately. I can also think almost completely in wordless concept-strings, but that sometimes feels forced.

Maybe I should mention that I learned a few words in French, German, and Spanish before I was 8, but the first time that I really studied a language in the usual sense was when I was about 12.

For me the feeling is very similar to having a word just on the "tip of your tongue", where you know the word you want, you can feel it, its meaning, etc. You know you'd recognize it instantly if you heard (saw) it, but you can't quite bring it up.

Sometimes I can't even tell if I actually am visualizing a face or not, because it's like for a split second I feel like I can almost see it, but then when I focus on it, it's gone. And other times I know I have seen people's faces in my mind, but it's generally spontaneous, not when I actively try to pull one up. Kind of like seeing something in your peripheral vision, but not being able to focus on it.

That said, I think an easier way to differentiate is to imagine a beach you've actually been to. When I tried to do that, the first thing to come to mind was a lake near my house. And I saw more of the lake than the beach actually - the trees behind it, the parking lot off to one side, etc. Thinking logically about that one, my mental picture is actually flawed, because that parking lot is farther away than it is in the mental picture that came up!

It seems like for a lot of people, the pictures actually have a "mind of their own" to some extent. Another comment mentioned imagining a triangle, and it turned out it was spinning. I can totally see that happening. You don't think, "I'm going to imagine a spinning triangle" or something - you just attempt to pull up a picture of a triangle, and your brain gives you a representation. Details you don't decide on will be filled in.

It really is fascinating. And from reading other comments on this post and others like it, it sounds like some people have a far stronger ability to visualize than I do. I'm mildly jealous, but at the same time, the OP for instance has obviously done just fine without - and is also a highly entertaining writer! (Who knows, perhaps even for reasons related to the aphantasia.)