![]() People with aphantasia can think about things just fine, but they can't visualize them." It's not usually as good as seeing the thing in the flesh, but they can usually get some of the way there. "Most people, if they're asked to think of an apple, or their front door, or their best friend, can have an experience which has a visual field. ![]() By mind's eye, I mean the capacity that most of us have to visualize things in their absence," Zeman, a professor of cognitive and behavioral neurology at University of Exeter, explained on a call. My childhood home, the Mashable office, and the face of loved ones I’ve known all my life are stored somewhere in my brain as memories, but I can't intentionally summon mental pictures of them no matter how hard I try. I encounter the same frustrating block when trying to picture anything. When I try to imagine a beach, though, I close my eyes and only see darkness. When most people try to imagine a beach they likely conjure some sort of picture in their heads, be it fuzzy or crystal clear, of sand, water, and perhaps a lifeguard chair. The article explained that a number of people go through life with "aphantasia," a term coined by neurologist Adam Zeman in 2015 to describe a lack of visual imagination. By the time I finished reading the excerpt, however, I could tell this stranger was about to describe my own lifelong experience with mental visualization. "How sad," I naively thought while clicking to learn what exactly the writer meant. Classic pre-anxiety attack words.) My timeline was its usual mess of memes and politics, but a tweet that linked to an experience piece from The Guardian, titled "I can't picture things in my mind" caught my attention. Minutes before taking refuge on the floor I was scrolling through Twitter. ![]() COME ON." I said them out loud - with real feeling - in hopes that the sheer sounds would trigger my brain to do what I'd just learned it wasn't capable of: creating a mental image. I sprawled out in the middle of the carpet, tightly clutched a throw pillow to my face, and squeezed my teary eyes shut before impatiently repeating the words, "BEACH. On a summer Friday a few years ago, I collapsed on my living room floor in a transformative defeat. Discover something new with Mashable's series I learned it on the internet. ![]() I'd absolutely state that this is something I can and will continue to "see" in movement.When we spend so much of our time online, we're bound to learn something while clicking and scrolling. I will still go through the book permanently picturing how they relate to other characters, say, on a psychological level. The nose will disappear from a picture that was never there. Unless it has further significance, it doesn't matter to me that a character was described as having a big nose in a book. They might know a person is "violent" but this knowledge is attached to something visual. I'm not entirely convinced that this is qualitatively different from how other people visualize, they just will describe it differently because of the way they organize their attention. I "see" the blotches on the board as much as I can "feel" or even "hear" them. If you tell me "picture a big green blotch next to a small red blotch on a coarse wooden board" I don't conjure a photographic image of it but I know how these three elements relate in any imaginable aspect. I'd describe my mode of "visualization" as knowing how things relate. Like, I have dreams that I almost never remember, that don't really have any visual imagery that stick with me, I mostly think in an internal monologue, but I also hear music in my head and love reading fiction, even though I don't really feel like I visualize it in the same way that other people describe it. Some can hear music in their head, others can't. Some dream, some don't, some just dream in ideas. Especially because when I read about other people describing other aspects of their aphantasia, they seem very hit or miss. But I also think that maybe I'm just normal, and take the word "visualize" too literally. Like, when I first heard of this, I thought I had it. I'd love to see some research on the topic, though. Right now, most of what I read about this is people describing what they imagine, using imprecise language, and I also think people have a tendency to be drawn to saying they have some interesting weird brain quirk they read about online, so I'm hesitant. I think the entire phenomenon could be partially just different people letting the word "visualize" do different degrees of work. It just seems like something that's so simultaneously subjective and hard to describe.
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