I have aphantasia, a mental disorder where I lack all internal visualization. I cannot “picture” things in my mind, I think in words and numbers and such. With this, I am very curious how the mental imagery works for the rest of you. Do you see it separate from your main vision? Does it get interposed? Is it like picture in picture? I’m baffled!
TIA.
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To be perfectly honest, I’m not fully convinced that aphantasia actually exists. I think that the people who self-diagnose have an overly ambitious idea of what mental visualization is like for other people and imagine it to be like a full hallucination rather than the abstract and incomplete ideas that people actually have when visualizing things.
If someone throws a ball at you, you only have to watch it for a second to have a pretty good idea of its trajectory and know where your hand should be if you want to catch it. Your inner eye is taking visual information and projecting it into the future to imagine where your body should be in order to catch the ball. You don’t watch a hallucination of where the ball will go, then act on that hallucination, you just understand how ballistics work and where the ball must go based on its vector and velocity.
There is a wide range of of skill in applying this tool to different situations, but those skills are learned, not innate. If you don’t watch a lot of movies, you can hardly be expected to be able to “see movies in your head”. If you haven’t taken apart machines and put them back together, you can hardly be expected to imagine how the pieces fit and move together.
Now, there are certainly people with brain damage that lose this ability (your prefrontal cortex is basically a second brain that the rest of your brain can send fake stimulae to for it to process imaginary scenarios; when damaged, you lose the ability to process these signals). But those people lose a lot of ability to function normally. Notoriously, lobotomies destroy this ability.
My hypothesis is that because people claiming to have aphantasia are not shambling around like lobotomy victims, they are probably just normally functioning people who haven’t developed specific skills and are intimidated by how people describe being able to do things that they are skilled at. It’s not because the people with “aphantasia” are lacking something fundamental; it’s because they haven’t developed the neural pathways through repetitive stimulus to imagine things in the same way as a skilled person. This is why self diagnosed aphantasia is often comorbid with learning disabilities.
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