It’s a funny thing. I often joke about how my life is really an open book online, to anyone who cares to ask, (with one obvious exception). But it’s one thing to reveal those details in the course of normal conversation, (by which I mean while commenting on other things) as so often happens when somebody else has brought up a subject, or touched on it in some way, and quite another to set out deliberately to talk about oneself.
Which, in case you hadn’t realised yet, I’m about to do (at length it turns out), for reasons that I’m not entirely clear about myself.
I guess the original impetus for this piece sprang from a link I posted more than a year ago now, (https://goo.gl/qcIb7R), and articulating my own experience with the subject has been kicking around my thoughts for a while now. I even knew what the title would be long before I started writing this.
(It’s funny how that happens when you write…sometimes you get a title, and have to work from there. Sometimes it’s a first line, sometimes it’s a last one. I once spent 3 years writing a 4 stanza poem…the first verse took 30 seconds. It popped into my head almost fully formed one night as I wandered the streets of London. I spent the next 3 years trying to work out what followed it, sometimes with that one verse pounding over and over in my head. And once I finally had the next 2 verses painfully arranged, the last one wrote itself in a few minutes.)
Procrastination is the thief of time they say, and this piece lingered over the last year as something I always suspected I’d get around to some day.
Then a few days ago, somebody made a comment on a reshare of something else I posted recently, which led to me replying and including that link above as a sort of post-script to my reply. (One of my infamous asides don’cha know. If you’re still here, you’re probably used to them by now.)
And that sorta got things started again.
Just Because Nobody Knows About It…
A bit more than a year ago I was sent that link by a friend of mine, pointing to a WSJ story (and from there to a brief academic paper) reporting that researchers had (largely by chance) stumbled across a previously unrecognised condition.
Of course, it was unknown in the same way that North America or Australia was once unknown…nobody who didn’t have it knew about it. The inhabitants however, were for the most part pretty aware of its existence. Even if they each thought that they might be the only one.
The researchers decided to call it aphantasia, the direct opposite of Aristotle’s term for people’s “richly visualised internal lives.” I call it everyday life. And what it boils down to is, very simply, that I can’t see pictures in my head.
Living With Aphantasia
For me of course, that’s a perfectly normal state of affairs. To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never been able to do so. The idea that most people can close their eyes, and literally “see” an image in some nebulous and undefined place inside their own head, is frankly a little strange to me. I only realised that they could for the first time when I was 10 or so.
(One of the most interesting things to me, but only peripherally mentioned in the study (and the reason I said “for the most part” up there) was the fact that some of the respondents didn’t realise until much later, and a couple of them only discovered it was unusual after reading about the study. I on the other hand have known for most of my life that everybody else can do something I can’t.)
People usually tell me that their thoughts are most often like video clips, projected on some internal screen behind the eyes, a private mental cinema where thoughts, fantasies, memories, and imagination all play out in glorious stereoscopic colour and surround-sound.
But all my thoughts, my memories, my imagination, are perhaps best described as an endless scroll, being read quietly to myself in an utterly dark room. (Except reading isn’t quite right either. It’s more like knowing what’s on it. More on this later.)
Of course, I don’t know any different.
Mapping The Unknown
Because I’d been aware of it since childhood, every now and then I’d talk about it with people in an attempt to understand just how they managed to “see” these mental images. Did their eyes have to be closed? Were they super-imposed on everything else they saw? Where exactly was the image situated? (Turns out (unsurprisingly) it’s a bit different for everybody.)
In all the talking about it, (which was not really that much, since people just didn’t seem to get it, which put me off raising the topic sometimes), I encountered exactly one person who experienced almost exactly the same thing. (A very smart guy who’s an ex-US Navy linguist, a member of the forum that’s been my main online home for the last 12 years, and not coincidentally, the friend who first sent me the link to the WSJ article.)
The researchers were pretty excited by the whole idea (as researchers tend to be when new fields of study open up) and had found only a small percentage of people who suffered from it. (No suffering is actually involved, I assure you.)
As a result of the WSJ article, which asked people to contact them if they (damn, there’s that word again) were “sufferers,” they discovered that the “condition” was a bit more common than they realised. (I contacted them myself and answered their questionnaire, they were very nice.) So far, they think it may affect around 2% of the population, but in the absence of a more widespread study, they can’t be sure yet.
The Language Of Disability
Another interesting thing about talking to people about it, or, now that its existence has become (relatively) common knowledge (in certain circles), reading about people talking about it, is the somewhat instinctive assumption by others that it’s some sort of handicap.
I suppose that if Aristotle had ever known of it, he would have had the same feeling. And to be honest, it’s a bit weird to consider the possibility that this may be the case…
Certainly Aristotle considered phantasia to be an essential component of the soul. He effectively defines it as “our desire for the mind to mediate anything not actually present to the senses with a mental image.”
He goes even further in his description of it in De Anima (III):
There is no thought without phantasia, and no phantasia without sensation.
So doubtless he would have considered myself and others of my ilk to be somehow deranged, or incomplete, being therefore necessarily (as he would see it) void of both thought and sensation.
I’m relieved to report therefore, that I do enjoy both, and I’ve never had much complaint about the functioning of my brain. (Except maybe when it comes to mathematics…I’m terrible at maths. Oh, and I can’t draw worth a damn.)
In most respects though, it appears to work pretty well actually. I have some thoughts about that which I’ll probably arrive at in due course.
Growing Up Mentally Blind
Hmmm…I’m not sure I like that sub-head…I may edit this out later. Again with the inference that it’s a problem. A disability. Language doesn’t seem to cater much for the fact that an inability is not necessarily a disadvantage.
Anyway, I had a pretty normal childhood and upbringing for the most part.
Researchers speculate that the “condition”could be congenital, or that it could be as the result of injury. (They discovered it when somebody who had undergone surgery reported losing the ability to see mental images, so it’s likely that damage to the brain during the procedure switched it off as it were.)
As it happens, I did actually suffer some potential damage on a few occasions, but please, save the jokes for the comments. ;)
The first was as a newborn, when our pet bull terrier, apparently struck with jealousy, attacked my mother as she held me. I was dropped on my head on a tiled floor, and (possibly as a result) sport a nice flat spot in my skull just over the occipital lobe, which as we know is the visual processing centre of the brain. My mother bore the scar of the dog bite on her ankle for the rest of her life.
Then, once when I was 6, and once when I was 10, I had pretty serious bouts of meningoencephalitis. A nasty combination of meningitis (an inflammation of the spinal fluid and meninges) and encephalitis, (an infection of the brain).
Since it’s known to cause seizures, convulsions, strokes, hallucinations, memory problems, learning problems, permanent impairment and/or deafness, I’ve always considered I got off pretty light. If the real cost was this inner eye y’all talk about, well, I still think I got off light.
I’ll Always Be A Word Man
It might have been any of these things, or none of them, that caused it. I’ll never know, and I guarantee that I lose exactly zero sleep over the question.
If it was one of them, and I had to make a guess as to which, my bet would be on the infant head trauma really. I have no memory of ever being able to conjure these phantastical images in my head, whereas I remember most of my childhood (not to mention subsequent years) very well.
In fact, if I say so myself, my memory is pretty damn good. I carry around big chunks of Shakespeare, Shelley, Byron, Eliot, Yeats, McCauly, Kipling, and Gibran with me. Not to mention countless smaller chunks of all sorts of other writers and poets, and reams of usually useless but occasionally interesting information as well.
I’ve always found it pretty easy to memorise the written word, often without intending to, and I will quote appropriately at the least provocation.
I’ve mentioned before my lifelong love of language and words. Of poetry and fiction.
I was what I believe is euphemistically termed a “precocious” child. (That really means bloody annoying of course.) My long-suffering mother was a teacher in her youth, (actually both sides of the family were pretty erudite, her side with a distinct academic bent, and my fathers side with a long tradition of poetry and story-telling) and she did me the great service of teaching me to read even before I started school. A habit that has lasted my entire life.
In the words of the late, great, James Douglas Morrison then, “I’ll always be a word man…”
Memories Are Made Of This
I clearly remember the moment that I first realised that all these people around me could do something I couldn’t.
I was 10, going on 11, and I was attending extra-curricular classes at a place called the Schmerenbeck Institute. Gods alone know what purpose they actually had, (the name certainly sounds dire), but at the time it was sold to me as an opportunity to learn things that were more interesting than school work.
So I was at one of the classes one day, and the teacher/lecturer/professor/whatever asked us all to participate in a visualisation exercise. I don’t remember what the class was, or what the intent of the exercise was, but I remember the scene she asked us to visualise…it was a beach.
I don’t much like the beach, but it’s not linked in any way to this experience. (I’m more of a mountains kinda guy.)
She described the beach, the warm sand, the lapping waves, the accoutrements of beach visits, continually asking us to picture it in our minds, and other attendees were dutifully nodding or agreeing verbally when she asked if they could see it.
And somehow, I realised, they weren’t just thinking about it the way that I was, reviewing my knowledge of what these things looked like. They were actually experiencing it. They could see these things.
One might suppose that the revelation came as some sort of shock, or had some sort of profound impact on me, but it didn’t. I don’t really remember how I felt. I certainly didn’t bring up the fact that I couldn’t see it. If anything at all, I probably just took it as further reinforcement of my sneaking suspicion that I wasn’t quite the same as everybody else I knew.
And that was pretty much it. Things went on as usual, I went to school, and high school, and university. I travelled, I worked, I fell in love. I suffered the usual vagaries of life like everybody else, the triumphs, the disasters. (And like to think I mostly treated those two imposters both the same. ;) )
Inside The Eyeless Mind
Whenever I do talk about this, I invariably get asked what it’s like to not be able to see things in my head. The answer of course, is that I don’t know, because I don’t have anything to compare it to.
I don’t have any problem recognising things or people or places. I can identify colours, describe things, give and follow directions, pretty much anything that anybody else can do, except I can’t visualise anything.
I even talk in the language of visualisation. I speak of “imagining” things, or “seeing” things, or getting a “mental image,” even though I don’t, because the language of thought is largely founded in imagery.
But when I “imagine” an orange, it’s not a picture I see. I experience my knowledge of how it looks based on all the oranges I’ve seen, and everything I know about them, all at once.
I know for example that they’re round, I know that they’re orange and slightly oily, that their skin is thick and dimpled, that they sport a small greenish rosette where they were once attached to a tree.
It’s not even a matter of running through a list of these characteristics in my head. (Unless I’m describing it to somebody.) All of those facts combine into my immediate knowledge of what it looks like. I don’t have to think about what it looks like, because I know what it looks like. If you showed me one right now, I’d go “Yep, that’s an orange all right.”
I don’t need to see these things in my head, because I know them. I’m aware of them as facts. In a similar way I “imagine” that most readers of this are aware of what honour is, or punctuality. Abstract concepts that have no image readily associated with them. The way I assume you are aware that oranges are a citrus fruit, even though “citrus” as a concept has no “picture.”
I’ve seen an orange before, therefore I know what oranges look like. I know what colour orange is, because when I learned my colours, somebody pointed at a shade and said “that colour is orange.”
When I think of it, I think of that scene in The Matrix, where Cypher shows Neo the endlessly scrolling code, and tells him that he doesn’t even see the code any more, just what it represents.
Except, without the cool visuals of course.
Storage Space
A few paragraphs back, I talked about my memory, which I mentioned is pretty good. Maybe even uncommonly good. (Sadly not perfect by any means though.)
I’ve long suspected that it’s because text takes up less space than video does. :) The combined King James Version of the bible takes up about 4MB if it’s in a plain text format. That’s over 3.5 million characters, in 4MB. (This piece, in contrast, is a bit more than 18,000 characters.)
Now, since I’ve been online for more than 20 years, I remember files smaller than 4MB. (Hell, I remember programs that were only a few hundred Kb.) These days though, a smart phone photo takes up more space. 10 minutes of HD video (depending on factors like encoding etc.) can run you anywhere between 150MB and 1.5GB.
The latest estimates of the potential storage capacity of the brain (quite recently revised actually) suggest that it could be as much as a petabyte. 1,024 terabytes.
That’s a lot of video. (In fact, it’s about 120,000 hours of video.) But it’s a hell of a lot more text. (1.12589990715 characters as it happens.) I believe that everything we ever see or read or hear is stored in there. It’s the retrieval that’s the problem. If I think about it, I could imagine it (I do imagine things, I just don’t see them) as a sort of card system, like the old library index cards, that we shuffle through in search of something.
My only complaint is that it’s impossible for me to try out the classic technique of the memory palace. ;)
Other Stuff
There are a couple of other aspects where I suspect the my inability to visualise affects the way my brain works. I read pretty fast for one thing, about 1,200-1,400 words a minute. My guess is I don’t have to take the time, or use the processing power, to generate images of what I’m reading. (Also I have lots of practice of course, which does help. )
My sense of the passage of time is a bit odd too. I tend to feel as though things have happened much more recently than they actually have. That recently revised estimate I mentioned above happened in January. To me, “the other day” means within the last 3 months or so. “A while back” is any time in the last 2-3 years.
If I talk about something that happened to me, I sometimes feel a bit shocked when I realise it was, say, 10 years ago. There’s no real differentiation in my memories in terms of elapsed time. I tend remember things with the same clarity regardless of when they actually happened. (On the other side, I have real difficulty thinking of (or imagining) the future. I’m a very present-oriented person…the past is gone, the future hasn’t happened, it’s always now and I’m always here.)
Things like sounds or smells don’t trigger memories in me. Certainly not in the sense that they appear to do for others. I can’t relive memories, because I don’t “see” them playing out. All I have is the knowledge that something happened, and it’s usually pretty removed from the emotional or psychological impact of the event when it happened.
I can remember what I felt at the time. I just don’t feel it again.
And I don’t dream. Once in a very long while, I might awaken feeling that I had dreamed, but it’s only a very nebulous sensation…there’s no memory of any dream, or even any certainty. When I fall asleep, it’s almost always as though I instantly and seamlessly transition x number of hours into the future. There’s no sense of time having passed.
Closing Arguments
Well, that’s pretty much it really. Everything I can think of about how being aphantasic might have affected me, and how I experience it. The closest I can get to explaining colour to blind people. ;)
The whole way through I’ve been in two minds about posting this. It sounds altogether too much like talking about myself. (Probably because that’s exactly what it is.) It’s not really necessary. It doesn’t achieve anything much. (Not that it needs to of course.) I don’t even feel particularly strongly about it one way or another.
For some reason though, it’s apparently something I wanted to write. And I’ve realised that despite thinking I write only for myself, it’s not strictly true. I might write for myself, but everything I write, everything that anybody writes, I think, is written to an audience. Whether the audience exists or not.
If you made it all this way with me, then I guess that’s you.