Weird thing about realising I have #aphantasia: I quite often become aware of when I'm slipping over into sleep now. If I slip into a REM/dreaming state and I'm suddenly 'seeing' things in my head there can still be a tiny still-conscious part of me that recognises now it's not normal for me so I must be sleeping.

I think I found a positive side about having #aphantasia. I have it regarding all senses (I didn't even know people could see in their mind let alone smell, hear etc.)

I have been studying a case where everyone seems to believe a story a person tells them even if logic says it's not a real story. Sorry for no more details. But this is a thing where someone accuses someone about something they did and people generally believe this even if all the evidence leans on it being a false story.

Suddenly I realised if people "see" the story vividly in their minds, and even hear it, all the heartfelt tones of voice and all, it could be hard to distinguish if the story is not true. If you can see it like a movie, it might feel more real to you?

I only have logic and analysing the words. And the evidence tells me it's not true. (But I have no way of making others understand it's not true since I can't tell an emotional story about it.)

One of the reasons I think I’ve always been drawn to photography: I have #aphantasia. I can’t ’make up’ images in my head. I don’t have *any* images in my head.

‘Imagine a palm tree swaying..’ I can imagine the breeze and the smell of the scene. But I can’t see the palm tree. Or the sea. Or the beach.

I have no visual dreams. In my dreams. I can feel space and sense smell: the smell of a crowded, smoky bar in a dream is far more vivid than any picture I can make up, because there is no picture.

Photography helps me remember things I have seen, that I will never again visually recall.

Great article on Nautilus about #aphantasia. Really covers the lived experiences and "your brain just tackles tasks differently" aspect quite well.

https://nautil.us/my-brain-doesnt-picture-things-407444

One of the things about #aphantasia (not able to form images in my brain) is fantasy and sci-fi have been very hard for me to read.

I have to look up fan art to help anchor me in what things that don’t exist look like.

I’ve been thinking about how having #aphantasia (inability to form images in my mind) has a relationship with how I process grief.

For example, my beloved dog Cookie passed away in June last year. I grieved her of course, but I legitimately don’t think about her actively unless I look at a photo of her. She’s just not in my brain. Nothing really is.

It’s an interesting way to perceive the world, differently from most of you.

What is in my brain: ideas, words, concepts. I describe the way I think as ‘a wall of text that is floating by, I have to grasp at it to translate some chunk to the world’.

A while back someone shared an article about using #ML to recognize the object a person was visualizing by training the system on their brain patterns while seeing the object.

I wondered at the time if that would work with people with #aphantasia, and suspected it would not.

Well, the verdict is in, and it's even weirder than that.

1. The near visual cortex does activate with patterns when people with aphantasia try to recall an image.
2. But the activation bears no apparent resemblance to what happens when they actually see the object. ML can't decode it.
3. It's on the wrong side of the brain.

The first ones don't surprise me, but the last one is particularly curious. It's one of those things you probably learned in high school. "The left visual cortex receives information from the right eye and visual field. The right visual cortex receives information from the left eye and visual field." Nope. Not for people with aphantasia. For them the processing is on the same side as the eye.

At this point nobody knows what this means. The researcher in the video suggests that maybe the activity in the near visual cortex isn't strong enough to trigger vision. But they also say it's warped in some way that isn't understood.

For me at least, it feels like I'm simply picking out what appear to be salient attributes from the image, rather than an image.* Which makes me wonder whether there's anyone with aphantasia who also doesn't have an internal speaking voice, because I have no idea how I would recall an image if I couldn't talk out a description.

* The other month I was was introduced to and invited to a meetup by a man I talked to. And a month later I was at the meetup and ran into the party organizer and the person who invited me, and thought the first was the second. The person I mistook for who invited me was a tall thin grey haired white man with a beard. The person who did invite me was a middle-aged heavy set black man. Looking back, I realized I'd only registered his outgoing boisterous personality, and that's the thing they both had in common. I'm not face blind, but it takes multiple exposures to someone before I can come up with a reliable recognition algorithm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b38qWjlMAvs

Marco Giancotti’s brain can’t imagine a sunset, the sound of a bell, the smell of bread baking, or little else.
In this fascinating piece for Nautilus, Giancotti introduces us to #aphantasia,
a condition that prevents him from picturing any “kind of sensory stimulation” in his mind.
…as soon as I close my eyes, what I see are not everyday objects, animals, and vehicles, but the dark underside of my eyelids.
I can’t willingly form the faintest of images in my mind.
And, although it isn’t the subject of the current experiment, I also can’t conjure sounds, smells, or any other kind of sensory stimulation inside my head.
I have what is called “aphantasia,” the absence of voluntary imagination of the senses.
My whole life, I’ve been aware
—sometimes painfully so
—of my own peculiarities, strengths, and weaknesses:
A terrible memory, a good sense of direction, and what I felt was a lack of “visual creativity,” among others.
I always thought these were just random, disconnected traits, and didn’t think much about them.
Who doesn’t have their quirks?
https://longreads.com/2023/10/10/my-brain-doesnt-picture-things/

I have #aphantasia and I can’t make visual images in my head. ‘Picture an apple’.. I can’t picture anything. People have asked me how I dream. I don’t have visual dreams.

I just had a dream in which I.. smelled a variety of things. Interesting!

#Introduction with a billion #hashtags...

I'm Alba, a #trans #nonbinay #bisexual #autistic #vegan #antifascist #activist from #Nijmegen, #NL. In addition to my #autism, I've also got #ADHD, #hyperlexia, related auditory processing and executive function issues, #aphantasia and #SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory). I'm an IT #tech at a large #international company, a volunteer for the #radical #intersectional #anticapitalist #political party #BIJ1 and a freelance #translator. I speak #Nederlands, #français, #English, #Deutsch and #Esperanto. I play #saxophone - I have a bari sax, a tenor sax and a soprano sax. I also have a #flute and a #ukelele but I don't play those nearly as well as the saxes. I love playing #TTRPG like #DnD5e and #PF2e, and I have two #cats, an orange slonk called Hobbes and a void chonk called Nita.

I used to hang out on mastodon.lol until early 2023 when that instance shut down. I then moved to todon.nl and recently decided to hop on to blahaj.zone ​​

I had a weird thought about my #aphantasia. I repeat-buy products based on the packaging appearace, I rarely remember brand names (which makes it annoying when companies change packaging!).

But I can never bring these pictures to mind, I just 'know it when I see it' this seems to imply that my brain is storing images and comparing them, but not displaying them, like a 'headless' server computer :)

A fascinating video on aphantasia here. While we’ve been thinking and saying that there are people who lack mental imagery, it appears that they may in fact *have* mental imagery, but lack the conscious experience of what is happening:

https://youtu.be/avI0KtmNpo8

Props to Hakwan Lau for their neuroscience work.

Ooooh, interesting little study about #aphantasia here:

https://www.livescience.com/health/neuroscience/people-who-cant-see-with-their-minds-eye-have-different-wiring-in-the-brain

I was just doing a "Mindful Cooldown" exercise on Apple TV and like most it ends with a short meditation.

Sometimes these involve focusing on your body, part by part. Those I find very effective, because I may stand there thinking I'm relaxed, but as we walk through focusing on different areas I realize that actually I'm far more tense than I thought.

Other times though, it involves visualization. This one started by visualizing grey clouds holding your stress, and then letting them open up to blue sky to take it away.

But I can't visualize things. All I can do is look at the static behind my eyelids and think about the words. Try to remember what a grey sky looks like. Grey. Bumpy. Different ranges of dark and light. Okay, now with some blue. What's a time I've seen that? What did they look like? It's all words and feelings, not images. And furthermore, trying to focus and conjure up more detail is work, not relaxation.

But it did make me think about what the exercise would be like to people who can see with their mind's eye. That would be very relaxing.

Which makes me wonder, for people who meditate. When you're supposed to blank your mind and relax, does that mean no pictures either? Because I feel like I'd have a lot easier time shutting up the words and thoughts that constantly run through my brain if I could focus on an image in my head instead. But frankly, the only time I was ever able to empty my mind for a period of time was when I was curled up at someone's feet in subspace.

A friend shared this with me. I haven't taken it yet but I'm very excited to see people studying the impact of #aphantasia on memory (I did a little survey here on an aspect of that a few months ago).

Survey Of Autobiographical Memory · Aphantasia Network https://aphantasia.com/study/autobiographical-memory/

Wondering about the relationship between #aphantasia and grief.

If I can’t make pictures in my head, I can’t hold the images of anyone I love and am grieving in my head (it’s true). (I have aphantasia and I have no images in my head at all)

I always thought that movie or TV depictions of grief of people popping up in people’s lives was like, TV depiction of ghosts, not grief.

I can’t picture anyone, not even my own face, not my wife’s, not my late dog (who I love and grief, but not in a visual way).