Aphantasia, being blind in your minds eye

What a word, aphantasia. What does it mean, you're thinking. Well, it's a relatively old concept by Francis Galton who in 1880 discovered this phenomenon but it has since been a topic of interest again in 2015 when Professor Adam Zeman from the University of Exeter conducted a study and coined the term we know now as aphantasia. 

Basically it means that there are some people, roughly around 2% of the population that have a blind mind's eye. If you still don't understand, basically it's when a person can't picture anything in their mind. There isn't a lot of research behind this phenomenon but I'm sure maybe in the future more will be done to research it.

There's actually a spectrum on how much or how little one can see in their mind. One way to show you how it may look in different stages is through this star test. To counter this, some say it's not a very accurate way to measure aphantasia.

To explain how the star test works, you have to close your eyes and picture a red star in your minds eye. Picture it as vividly as possible. Then, say what you see based on the scale of this diagram below:

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People with aphantasia usually see number 1, which is total darkness. That's what I have. I believe it's called complete aphantasia. So no matter how much I try to force my mind to conjure up an image, I just can't. Since finding out about having aphantasia, nothing has changed of course, but knowing that most people in the world can see images in their minds makes me kind of jealous, haha, what a superpower that is. I always thought everybody couldn't actually see anything in their minds but just a figurative concept. You know, a metaphor. Boy was I wrong.

An example, when you were a child and your mum or dad said to count the sheep to fall asleep you would count the sheep as you could visualise them. Well not people with aphantasia. How were we supposed to count sheep? We couldn't see them. We would just be counting numbers in our heads.

Here is a personal example, when I read fiction I just can't imagine how characters look or what the world looks like. Most people with aphantasia don't really care for heavy descriptions because they can't picture it. However for me personally, I do enjoy descriptive passages because even though I can't see it in my head, I can picture figuratively how it may look like. That's why when I used to write fiction stories as a teenager, I used to use google images for inspiration as I couldn't imagine how places or people would look.

Do you remember when you were a child and someone would ask you to close your eyes and imagine that you were, for example, sitting on a beach and seeing the waves move. Naturally, you would have seen it there in clear as day quality, like a photo or video image in your mind. I bet finding out that some people just don't have the same ability is a bit mind boggling to you, but guess my surprise when I found out I was part of the anomaly.

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I guess one of the positives for having aphantasia is that I don't get distracted from mental images or upsetting scenes that may appear randomly. Unfortunately a saddening revelation is that since only a small percentage of people don't see mental images, us folks won't ever be able to picture loved ones. If we didn't have photos we would never be able to remember how they looked visually. That's quite unfortunate. Sure, we can describe people based on our memory but it's through thinking and not seeing. That's the main difference I believe is just seeing vs thinking.

Life doesn't stop for aphantasians of course, I'm not writing this to complain but merely to spread awareness. There's probably a handful of you who may be interested in some psychological topics. I myself am very interested in psychology topics so I may include more in the future (and is one reason I'm going to university to study psychology 😊 - more on that in a new blog post)

Here are some links you can check out if you're interested in reading more about it:

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If you've found this piece interesting, do leave me a comment or even a share... thank you for reading this blog post and until next time,

Charlotte x