Lol imagine not being able to picture things in your head. Oh wait...
this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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I sometimes wonder if there's not some sort of miscommunication about what it means to visualize something in your head.
I don't have aphantasia, but hearing some people try to describe what it's like to imagine something I think some people could get the idea that it's like a voluntary hallucination, literally seeing a thing that isn't there that you can conjure up and dismiss at your pleasure.
And that's certainly not my experience (though it's possible people have different experiences with it, I can of course only speak for myself)
The things I imagine don't actually exist in my vision. It's definitely getting processed through the visual parts of my brain, there's a sort of visual mental model with all of the dimensions and color information and such, but it's sort like a video game with the monitor turned off, except since my brain is the computer so I can just keep playing the game, I know where everything is, what it looks like, what it's doing, all of the physics and such still work, it's just not ending up on my brain's screen.
On the good side, we're much less affected by trauma, because we're not haunted by replays of it in our minds. So there's that. Also, we can torment visualizers with words like "moist", and describing disgusting things that they "see" in their heads, while we're unaffected.
Use this power only for good, or at least for a good laugh. 😉
Yes, and not interested in changing.
I'm me and I'm happy. I find that the strategies I learned as a kid sometimes allow me to think more clearly and procedurally than others. I'm not haunted by images of the past. I do take extra photos now that I know what's up. All in all, I don't see it as much of a negative. It's far better than some of the other conditions I was thinking I might have, before I learned about aphantasia.
I was fairly active on r/aphantasia for a bit, but I started to back away when they went for this "total aphant" thing, where you weren't really in the club unless you couldn't imagine with any senses at all.