r/Aphantasia

I was wondering if anyone else shared an experience similar to mine or if I am just projecting. Growing up, I internalized not being able to visualize things in my head as a sign that I was not really good at reading literature. This was influenced by English teachers, friends, family, and more. I grew up in an environment where pleasure with reading was depicted as enjoying a mental movie. I never got "lost in the world" because I was just staring at the words on the page. I even remember seeing tiktoks downplaying the experience of seeing words on the page as well for example. Since I was never able to do that, I think that I internalized that I could not read for pleasure. So instead I read things not for pleasure but for utility, such as factual content. I'm wondering about the situation for others with aphantasia — if their environment influenced whether they read for pleasure or not. I'd assume if you grew up in an environment that lacked potentially harmful visualizer bias, you would read the same amount as people who can see. This is all just speculation, of course. I only comment on this because I only started to enjoy reading once I knew what aphantasia was and approached pleasure reading from a different lens. Any input would be nice!

I’m sorry I’m going to raise a thing that might seem confrontional but..

I’m tired of feeling like people with SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory) taking over the narrative, trying to make it so that aphantasia and SDAM is one and same thing. Blurring and mixing traits between those two distinctly different cognition types.

So I feel like I don’t belong when I got something that could be described as the opposite of SDAM (or in middle of that and normal) but still being a total (visual) aphant.

So I really wish we could keep those things apart.

It is as if I’m claiming autism and aphantasia is same thing as I got both of them. It is false correlation. So I feel same about this.

What do you think?

Also. My mind isn’t quiet either. It is constantly racing.

So I got annoyed when I read the latest newsletter from aphantasia.com mentioning things about quiet mind (no the opposite) and remembering memories as facts instead for experience (i don’t recognize this) and writing as some mutual recognition.

So I feel..

Sigh

I am aphantasic AF, and have always had trouble with mind-muscle connection. Realizing the extent of aphantasia has been helpful in understanding why this has always been such a struggle, but I would like to level up my powers to try and combat it.

In order to "activate" the connection, its a bit easier if I touch the body part, but its not always practical when lifting weights, for example. Yoga is marginally easier than lifting weights because once I "feel" a body part activated, it feels more real and tangible to imagine it. But for some lifting exercises, I want to be able to target that spot before doing the thing to do it properly.

Its a strange experience to imagine my hip flexor, for example, and have the concept of my hip flexor in my mind, but no actual connection to the literal flexor on my own body.

Do any of my fellow aphants that share this experience have any tips or tricks to help?

Please tell me if I have aphantasia because my friend and I have been arguing for an hour.

The apple test to me doesn’t really make sense, because while I wouldn’t say I can ‘see’ an apple, i can certainly imagine it. The best way I could describe it to my friend is that I’m perceiving the image without seeing it, meaning I’m not recreating the sensory experience but I am perceiving it. So I can perceive the apple but my brain skips the stage of recreating the sensory experience.

Anyway, keen to hear what people think about that. I think our argument is a semantic one and we just understand ‘seeing’ differently, but she insists she can vividly see an apple and that doesn’t resonate with me.

I can't visualize and I don't know how to without visualization

this struck me as a useful way of explaining the difference between mental imagery and sight for people who don't form mental images.

when i "imagine an apple", a few things come to mind. i get a general visual gestalt of an apple with certain visual qualities (e.g. it's green); i get a detailed "zoom-in" of a small part of the apple's surface including things like texture, beads of moisture, shine; and if it occurs to me to think about about these things i can imagine the sound of someone biting the apple or the texture of one of those really unpleasant mealy apples. these things have sensory "quality" but not "presence", i.e. there's no floating apple blocking out my visual field. my visual field only contains things that i'm seeing.

the main thing is—because none of this is happening in the visual field and isn't related to "sight" from the eyes—i experience all of the above at the same time or in rapid succession. it doesn't really compose or play out like a scene or a static "image" so much as a fluctuating network of sensory impressions, of which any one can be hard for me to isolate or focus on. to me, this is one of the most fundamental ways "visualization" is not like sight.