science

I have aphantasia. I never knew it was a thing, or that not being able to picture things in my mind was different from what most people experience until I saw a Ted talk about it a few years ago.

I am a creative person but my creations are very iterative because I have to make something, see it, then decide how I want to change it. But it’s very difficult for me to get a sense of what each change will actually look like until I make it. And inevitably I will need to change more once I see the next stage. So there’s a lot of trial and error, or a lot of ‘versions’ before I’m done.

This only affects visual stuff - painting, molding, drawing, planning to construct something and visualizing the final form, etc. Even just thinking about how a room will look by rearranging furniture is difficult until I actually start moving things.

If I’m creating something that’s not visual, say just writing a story, it’s not an issue.

One of my favorite authors, Mark Lawrence, has this and he does just fine. Funnily he seems to straddle the line of creative / technical since he was a scientist before becoming an author. It's interesting, but like the article says it's not a disorder. Just a different way the brain can work.

I'm pretty sure I have aphantasia. My mom, on the other hand, is an artist with very powerful imagination. She would often tell me how she sees something she's imagining and I never really knew what she meant. I just assumed that it's kinda a figure of speech. Only when I first read about aphantasia I realized that it probably really works completely differently for her.

I would like to know whether aphantasia has any practical impact on one's life. For example, I had this suspicion that differences in my "mental image processing pipeline" might be a factor in my terrible driving skills. Quick visual assessment of the traffic situation, at an intersection for instance, is very hard for me. This is just me making stuff up though, no idea if it makes any sense. In fact, I think I'm going to research this topic and look for some papers now!

Discovered my wife is likely aphantasiac a few weeks ago. Real weird day.