My memory has always been one of my superpowers.
I have clear memories from as young as two – I can describe who was in a conversation, what was happening, and the layout of the space with who was where in extreme detail.
Over the years, people have asked me if I’ve got a photographic memory.
I don’t. I have the opposite. I have multi-sensory aphantasia.
What’s that mean?
Aphantasia
Aphantasia – or image-free thinking – is a unique way of thinking where thoughts and memories aren’t experienced with mental imagery in “the mind’s eye”. Multi-sensory aphantasia is when this is across two or more sensory modalities. More on that in a moment…
Before I share my experience of aphantasia, there a few things I want to make explicit.
This introspection can be confronting and it’s a one-way door.
When you reflect on and understand more about how you think and remember things, you can’t unlearn it. It can cause some people distress for various reasons. I feel a duty of care to be clear about that. Now might not be the right time to explore this.
I’m only sharing my own experience of multi-sensory aphantasia. Other people with aphantasia might have a similar experience, and others will experience things completely differently.
I’m not speaking on behalf of anyone else and I’m not making any judgements on what others should do or how they experience it.
Aphantasia isn’t something to pathologise. It’s just a neurodifference and I approach it with a strengths-based perspective. People have different ways of thinking, learning, and processing information, and these variations are normal and valuable. I play to my strengths… and I encourage the people I work with to as well.
Normality
Even as we start talking about it, it’s usually framed in what people with aphantasia can’t do. The comparative approach tends to jump straight into a deficit conversation based on an assumed “normal”.
I think of “normal” as a case of zoom. If you zoom out, the difference between us as people is minor.
As you zoom in a bit, we tend to start looking at specific attributes of people on a distribution curve, with normal being in the body of the curve – with people at the edges are considered “different”. Try mapping the intersection of multiple attributes of the world’s people, and the distribution curve doesn’t work.
Zoom in to the individual – and the individual next to them – and suddenly it’s clear that no two people are the same.
We all have our unique neuropathways, cognitive biases, temperaments, and abilities – a mix of genetic predispositions, environment, and choice.
“Normal” is often determined by situation and environment.
Intersectionality
With something like aphantasia, it can be given explanatory power for all sorts of behaviours, preferences, abilities (or lack of), and attitudes.
I find this can be dangerous. We’ve got a long history of seeking patterns… and sometimes creating them where they don’t exist.
The current version of me is the result of my genetics, the environments I grew up in, decisions I’ve made and how I responded to the consequences of those actions… and a heavy dose of random chance. I’m the intersectionality of all these things.
My model of the world is also shaped by my reality – that after I’ve experienced something from the external world as an image, sound, touch, smell, taste, or something from my other senses (yes we have more than five), I don’t think or remember using a reconstructed version of that sensory input.
Why Am I Sharing?
There are a few reasons.
Metacognition & Self-Awareness
Metacognition – thinking about how we think – is a powerful reflective practice and something I’ve always done… decades before I had the language for it.
This self-awareness helps us understand how we think and learn, it identifies our strengths and how we approach challenges. This results in better decision-making.
Metacognition talks about reflecting on the contents of our thoughts – what we think and why. How we feel, what triggers certain reactions, and it helps us build the ability to create time to choose our responses. It helps regulate our threat sensors – which outnumber our reward sensors 5 to 1.
I’ve never heard anyone talking about the functional level of this – how we personally take in sensory data, filter it through our paradigms to make sense and meaning, store memories with our relationship to them, and then recall, and sometimes share.
I suspect this is because it’s usually assumed that people pretty much functionally think and then create and recall memories in the same way.
Increasing awareness of how we and others interact with and construct models of the world is core to self-awareness and empathy.
Empathy
By sharing some of my reflections I hope it will make you more curious about your own thinking and memory and help you increase self-awareness… and through that open up deeper opportunities for curiosity and empathy with other people.
We all experience the world and make sense of it in our own unique way.
Curiosity & Consciousness
I’m curious and love learning about – and building empathy with – how people experience and make sense of the world… the qualities of our subjective experience and how it plays out in our decisions and actions. And in an applied way – how we design for positive behaviour change.
Closely related, I’m fascinated by consciousness – philosophy of mind, neuroscience, theory of mind, mindbody, quantum, and related fields – and I’ve been constantly exploring these things since my mid-teens. Not formally, but in a lifelong learning way.
What consciousness might be, how it arises (and can it arise from something that isn’t conscious), where it goes when we sleep, and so many other questions. Questions I’m comfortable exploring but don’t feel the need to immediately resolve.
Without taking a position, I lean toward some form of panpsychism along the lines David Chalmers talks about (the Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist at NYU), but that’s a rabbit hole for another time.
There are some unique things about aphantasia that might help us learn more about consciousness. Subjective experience is often the central framing when researching consciousness with qualia as the sensory ingredients – resulting in key questions like “what’s the experience of the colour red”.
With aphantasia, it’s a different experience.
The Aphantasia Experience
Aphantasia isn’t just one thing. It’s a spectrum of sensory experience in the mind. Aphantasia is at one end of the spectrum and hyperphantasia at the other – with extremely vivid and lifelike mental images, so clear they can feel as real as actual perception.
There are many other points on that spectrum – and it might not be the same for everything you think about or when you think about it.
Talking with friends over the years, some recall memories in photorealistic still images, some as a video, some with audio, smells, and sensations. Others have had sketches, vague images, or fully animated cartoons in vivid colours. Some people even have a piece of music playing as if they were hearing it through their ears.
How vivid is your mind’s eye? The Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) explores the vividness of your visual imagination. A simple questionnaire to help you get a sense where you sit on this mental imagery spectrum.
The term aphantasia was coined in 2015… a counter to Aristotle saying we think in images, which he called phantasia. The British psychologist Francis Galton wrote about “non-imagers” in the 1800s. David Marks created the VVIQ in 1973. Aphantasia is a new term, the experience isn’t.
My Experience of Aphantasia?
So how do I actually experience it?
What’s it look like in my everyday life? What are the challenges? What are the benefits? I’ll cover that in part 2 of this post.
In the meantime…
Think Visual Meetup. The Mind’s Eye: Neurodiversity & The Creative Practice
On Wednesday, 21 May at 8am, I’ll be sharing more at the Think Visual Meetup. Diana Ayoub will host a conversation between Josh Bradshaw and I – we both have aphantasia – and Alan Chen, who is at the other end of the spectrum and has hyperphantasia.
I can’t wait to explore the various ways we experience the world… come and join us.
