Aphantasia: how it feels to be blind in your mind

[Nikky Lee]

I came across this article a number of years ago, and a recent post on Facebook reminded me of it. I found it fascinating.

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I recently learned aphantasia is on a spectrum—it's not a case of either you have it or you don't.

I'm a very visual reader. When I read, I experience it like a movie with sound and texture, and occasionally smell. I am fully immersed as if I'm there. I've realised that a lot of my writing tries to translate the movie in my head, with varying degrees of success.

I was talking about this with a writer friend and colleague earlier, and he said he doesn't visualise much at all, rather he has a narrator who reads inside his head. His writing style tends to be conversational, clever and witty. I wonder if there is a connection there.

Where about on the spectrum are you? Does it influence your writing? How?

 

[Dan Payne]

I'm definitely far on the latter end of the spectrum. I can visualise things but have to make a dedicated effort to do so and that doesn't work while attempting to read prose, so I read, and write, at one level remove. I would love to consider my writing style to be "conversational, clever and witty" (but I'm not in a position to judge). It does make writing first-person POV a little harder, as so much of first-person is subjective experience; a bit of extra distance for omniscient or 3rd person makes it possible to write a scene with just a few sketches for setting. I sometimes wonder how a good visualiser will interpret my scenes when I've left so much of the background blank.

 

[Malaika]

Interesting discussion. I tend to ignore most scenery when I read. I zero in on important objects and dialogue. Reading is still fully immersive for me, I'm there in the world. Just very zoomed in on what is happening and not the big picture. I tend to skim exposition unless it's something I don't know. Like a description of a forest...skim skim skim. It's like hills...blah blah blah...moss...blah blah...trees...okay got it. But a description of a medical procedure ...laser focus...I'm going to need every single one of those words to get the image in my head because I'm no doctor.

On the other hand, learning to write description by zeroing in on a few key objects was really hard to learn. I think it helps to do it as a little exercise name a place and then use three words to describe it.

Like Arab palace
Arches
Indigo carpets (oops two woods)
mosaic

maybe add some incense and your palace is pretty much accomplished. Step aside, Hemingway, I'm coming for ya!

 

[Malaika]

I sometimes wonder how a good visualiser will interpret my scenes when I've left so much of the background blank.

You'd be surprised. If the setting is in any way familiar readers fill it in quite readily. If I tell you I'm walking down a street in Paris at night, you already have a picture in your head. I don't need to mention pavement and lamps and cars and generic things. Just a few key pointer to make sure I have the right street. Something even as basic as "baroque facades" or "blinking neon" or "moonlight on the Seine" would get me to the right place.

 

[Nikky Lee]

If the setting is in any way familiar readers fill it in quite readily.

Definitely this. I know what mountains look like, what desert looks like, what trees look like. I don't need pages (or even paragraphs) of sweeping descriptions about the landscape (cough, Tolkien, I'm looking at you, cough) unless it is quite unique (eg. like the picture below, but even then a line or two of extra description is all I'd probably want).

However, I do love flashes of detail—that zeroing in you mentioned @Malaika. This focuses my attention on something specific in the setting and makes it exceptionally vivid in my mind while the rest of my imagination fills in the blanks around it. In the case of the picture, I might describe the feel of the limestone crumbling under a character's fingers when he/she touches it and leave it at that.

 

[Carol Rose]

Great topic! I definitely visualize things I read, even when the author hasn't put in a lot of description. My mind simply fills it in.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Such very different ways of thinking never much talked about.

I do enjoy having landscapes painted in words. I know what deserts and woods look like. But if I go to an art gallery of landscape paintings, I could look for hours at a wall of woodland paintings, and they would all be different, even if it was the same wood.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Fascinating comments @Kirsten. Just fascinating.

And as for Lego, sometimes (what a saddo) I watch this over and over. Trying to follow the mathematics. Some howl hoax. I think not. Gives me the absolute chills. Not in a bad way, but what do we in our supposed superiority really know about the nature of progress?

The Antikythera Mechanism


How it was handled to make it work: 'You can wind it forwards or backwards and it will tell you time of the next eclipse once you've wound it far enough. You could stop winding it and come back to it later and it would still work because the gear teeth are essentially doing the 'time steps' for you. Imagine it like a model solar system with just the Sun, Earth and Moon. But instead of actually building a model and checking when the Moon eclipses the Sun, it uses maths to simulate the model and when the dials line up correctly you know an eclipse will happen. '

 

[Robert M Derry]

I don't like heavy description as I usually fill in all the gaps with visualisation. I actually ignore the writer's visual descriptions of characters and I usually develop an image of what they look like based on their characterisation: speech, thoughts, actions, movements etc.

I visualise everything in the things I write and read and I can't imagine not doing that. I don't actually understand how somebody couldn't? Surely when you write or read something you can see it in your head? I can't fathom what it must be like to have 'a narrator' reading your story out in your head. I couldn't live without my visual imagination and I can't believe some people don't have this. Mind blown!

 

[Leonora]

Here is Edmund Burke from the 18th century with the definitive guide:
(From his Sublime and Beautiful)


Obscurity.
To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes. Every one will be sensible of this, who considers how greatly night adds to our dread, in all cases of danger, and how much the notions of ghosts and goblins, of which none can form clear ideas, affect minds which give credit to the popular tales concerning such sorts of beings. Those despotic governments which are founded on the passions of men, and principally upon the passion of fear, keep their chief as much as may be from the public eye. The policy has been the same in many cases of religion. Almost all the heathen temples were dark. Even in the barbarous temples of the Americans at this day, they keep their idol in a dark part of the hut, which is consecrated to his worship. For this purpose too the Druids performed all their ceremonies in the bosom of the darkest woods, and in the shade of the oldest and most spreading oaks. No person seems better to have understood the secret of heightening, or of setting terrible things, if I may use the expression, in their strongest light, by the force of a judicious obscurity than Milton. His description of death in the second book is admirably studied; it is astonishing with what a gloomy pomp, with what a significant and expressive uncertainty of strokes and coloring, he has finished the portrait of the king of terrors:
“The other shape,
If shape it might be called that shape had none
Distinguishable, in member, joint, or limb;
Or substance might be called that shadow seemed;
For each seemed either; black he stood as night;
Fierce as ten furies; terrible as hell;
And shook a deadly dart. What seemed his head
The likeness of a kingly crown had on.”
In this description all is dark, uncertain, confused, terrible, and sublime to the last degree.

Section IV.
Of the difference between clearness and obscurity with regard to the passions.

It is one thing to make an idea clear, and another to make it affecting to the imagination. If I make a drawing of a palace, or a temple, or a landscape, I present a very clear idea of those objects; but then (allowing for the effect of imitation which is something) my picture can at most affect only as the palace, temple, or landscape, would have affected in the reality. On the other hand, the most lively and spirited verbal description I can give raises a very obscure and imperfect idea of such objects; but then it is in my power to raise a stronger emotion by the description than I could do by the best painting.

And I think there are reasons in nature, why the obscure idea, when properly conveyed, should be more affecting than the clear. It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions. Knowledge and acquaintance make the most striking causes affect but little. It is thus with the vulgar; and all men are as the vulgar in what they do not understand. The ideas of eternity, and infinity, are among the most affecting we have: and yet perhaps there is nothing of which we really understand so little, as of infinity and eternity. We do not anywhere meet a more sublime description than this justly-celebrated one of Milton, wherein he gives the portrait of Satan with a dignity so suitable to the subject:

“He above the rest
In shape and gesture proudly eminent
Stood like a tower; his form had yet not lost
All her original brightness, nor appeared
Less than archangel ruined, and th’ excess
Of glory obscured: as when the sun new risen
Looks through the horizontal misty air
Shorn of his beams; or from behind the moon
In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations; and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs.”

Here is a very noble picture; and in what does this poetical picture consist? In images of a tower, an archangel, the sun rising through mists, or in an eclipse, the ruin of monarchs and the revolutions of kingdoms. The mind is hurried out of itself, by a crowd of great and confused images; which affect because they are crowded and confused. For separate them, and you lose much of the greatness; and join them, and you infallibly lose the clearness. The images raised by poetry are always of this obscure kind; though in general the effects of poetry are by no means to be attributed to the images it raises; which point we shall examine more at large hereafter. But painting, when we have allowed for the pleasure of imitation, can only affect simply by the images it presents; and even in painting, a judicious obscurity in some things contributes to the effect of the picture; because the images in painting are exactly similar to those in nature; and in nature, dark, confused, uncertain images have a greater power on the fancy to form the grander passions, than those have which are more clear and determinate. But where and when this observation may be applied to practice, and how far it shall be extended, will be better deduced from the nature of the subject, and from the occasion, than from any rules that can be given.
I am sensible that this idea has met with opposition, and is likely still to be rejected by several. But let it be considered that hardly anything can strike the mind with its greatness, which does not make some sort of approach towards infinity; which nothing can do whilst we are able to perceive its bounds; but to see an object distinctly, and to perceive its bounds, is one and the same thing. A clear idea is therefore another name for a little idea.

 

[Amber]

I came across this article a number of years ago, and a recent post on Facebook reminded me of it. I found it fascinating.

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I recently learned aphantasia is on a spectrum—it's not a case of either you have it or you don't.

I'm a very visual reader. When I read, I experience it like a movie with sound and texture, and occasionally smell. I am fully immersed as if I'm there. I've realised that a lot of my writing tries to translate the movie in my head, with varying degrees of success.

I was talking about this with a writer friend and colleague earlier, and he said he doesn't visualise much at all, rather he has a narrator who reads inside his head. His writing style tends to be conversational, clever and witty. I wonder if there is a connection there.

Where about on the spectrum are you? Does it influence your writing? How?

That's really interesting.

 

[Leonora]

That was a man who loved his rhetoric and lauded the obscurity introduced via the gish gallop.

By his logic, Conrad was successful because of his inscrutable descriptions and not in spite of them.

I don't think Burke is entirely wrong about the power of obscurity, I'm just not sure that the vague and unsettling byproducts of ambitious writing should be a goal of writing. I think that clarity should be the goal and that mystification is a natural result of a reach for what lies beyond understanding. If mystification is cynically engineered, as it often is, I think that makes the writing terrible.

There are a couple of successful, young writers on a website I frequent who were educated at Oxford and I'm struck by the 'proof by intimidation' style that they both adopt. They have clearly learned that an avalanche of words is the way to convince an audience of merit. Both of them are either destined for or already embedded within 'consulting' careers and I'm not a fan of their styles.

I've, perhaps, been overly influenced by writers like Vonnegut who try to make everything seem so simple and clear that it is stupid. It is quite frustrating to read the granfalloon wiki because it claims that Vonnegut came up with the idea after being influenced by an Oxford sociology professor who published around the same time that Vonnegut's novel was published, but in Vonnegut's own words, granfalloon came from an American anthropology prof in 1949. To muddy the story even more, in1983 another academic became famous by copying the granfalloon concept and renaming it 'imagined communities'. Who taught the concept better, the 1949 prof, the 1963 novelist, or the 1983 academic? Who was more clear? Does it matter? Probably not. The real crime is the splintering of syntax. When the academic invented his own syntax in 1983 to describe the old concept, he caused a narrative to fork unnecessarily and this form of obscurity has no value whatsoever.

If this tirade has a point, it is railing against unnecessary obscurity and praising the obscurity left by ambitious attempts to describe things that are impossible to describe. This is a clear idea, a little idea, yet an important idea that is too often forgotten in practice.

As a survivor of academia I love this link to academic language! Never thought about it in relation to Burke tho!
I think in its place he's right - and Conrad is a fantastic example. Also good advice for all the fantasy writers on here.

 

[Chase Gamwell]

It’s funny...how much detail my brain provides is determined by how much detail the writer provides.

For instance, if I’m reading something like George R.R. Martin or Robert Jordan, my brain tends to pull back to the point of narration. I’m overloaded, so my brain has a hard time processing the heavy writing style into images.

On the other hand, reading something with very little description outputs an incomplete scene, like a wide open, empty space with sparse details scattered throughout it.

Writers that strike a perfect balance are the ones that allow me to construct a full scene. And when that happens, reading is very enjoyable. Otherwise, I tend to lose interest and wander off...