I’ve written plenty more articles on the topic of Aphantasia if you’re ever interested in checking them out. I’d happily signpost you towards them if you do. Just let me know. Thanks again
You would not like to read my fiction. When I write anything, I describe in great detail the places, the smells, the sounds, the feeling on your skin. I would think 75% of what I write is descriptive writing. What's funny is that you can still understand what is going on, even without having the picture in your head. Blind imagination is a perfect description of it.
Thank you for talking about it. We tend to think that most people are the same, but we're so different most of the time.
Thank you for reading. Descriptive writing is easily understandable in fiction as it is essentially just information about a thing... Data. But, as I can't visualise it, it is mostly just superfluous to me. I don't need it for the book to serve its function to me, which is to convey a story. But it provides an integral function to neurotypical readers so I appreciate why it is there.
But for me I am only concerned with facts that directly inform the story and the characters therein...
I don't need to know what a room looks like, just what happens to the characters in it.
I don't need to know what colour their hair is, just their motivations, desires, fears, etc.
I don't need to know how dark and creepy Fanghorn Forest is, just how scared the Hobbits are when they are there...
I have tried to include visually descriptive language in my own recent work of fiction that I am serialising on Substack. It was bizarre and counter-intuitive writing about details that I can't see but I have tried to provide an experience where normal visualisers can inhabit the fictional world as book typically do. Problem is, I have no idea if I underdid it or overdid it.
Yes!! This has become such an interesting topic to me. I recently had a conversation with my niece, who explained to me that she has no mental imagery or internal dialogue. I was absolutely floored.
You explain it very well here.
So all that description, all the detail is just superfluous to you. You don’t need it. Wild. Thank You for going into such great detail on the subject.
It might be an interesting article for your Substack… Yours niece’s experiences with Aphantasia and your discovering of it. I know I have had dozens of fascinating conversations about Aphantasia on here since writing about it. People find it very interesting…
Thank you. I have written extensively on Aphantasia, (including my dissertation which is comprehensive) and I know I'm not done. It's an obsession of mine.
Yep. All descriptive language in novels is mostly useless to me. Makes me sad, really.
I can still comprehend that stuff, but I never 'see' any of it.
I would guess I'm halfway across the scale. I couldn't create faces from the book descriptions but I could retain them if I watched the movie first. I'd watch the movie for the visuals and read the book for the story. My brother is a solid one on the scale. He can envision whole 3d scenes in his head far beyond what I can. The best I can do is an image (usally cartoonish in detail)of an object in the center of my mind surround by ever darkening fog.
So interesting! How about numbers? Do you visualise sums, mental arithmetic? I've always had a pattern image of 1-100 in my head in the shape of a clock, then straight up to 20, then the numbers loop across to the left like washing pegged on a line with 30, 40 etc as high points. I never questioned it but it made arithmetic easy as a child - I could just read the answer from the mind picture. I once asked someone else how the numbers looked in their head and they had no idea what I was talking about!
I often get asked 'If you can't see a cat, do you see the word 'CAT'?'
Or they ask 'If you don't hear the words, do you see them. Like, in writing'. In fact someone asked me that today.
But 'seeing' a representation of written words would be still visualising by definition, and I don't see anything. No words as writing, no numbers as symbols, nothing. I have only ever seen black when I close my eyes or tried to imagine anything visual.
As far a doing arithmetic goes, its the same as anything else. I am aware of what the numbers are and what I need to calculate to find the answer and I work it out (slowly because I'm bad at mathematics). At no point in this process do I see anything in my imagination.
In truth I would have to say 'I don't know' because the phenomenological experience I am referencing when I use the term is not only something I have never experienced myself but also something I inherently lack the tools to even contemplate.
When I say 'Internal Monologue', I am using it as I find it in the literature I have read on Aphantasia. (Alan Kendle's book 'Aphantasia : Experiences, Insights and Perceptions' and the work of Professor Adam Zeman)
People have used the term in these sources and in real life conversations with me ad nauseum. Many say they are 'talking all the time' in their minds. One friend of mine blamed it for his insomnia; 'I never shut up in my head. It keeps my up every night'.
When I ask them 'Is it like JD in the show 'Scrubs'. Your just walking around, going about your business and narrating everything that's going on to yourself in your head"? An unbelievable amount of people have told me 'Yes! Exactly!' to that question.
From my persepective, its like any other aspect of this condition: I struggle to believe it is real. That most people are going around talking to themselves 24/7 or watching little movies in their heads. I still can't help but feel I am being 'Punk'd': like it's all an elaborate practical joke.
I think them. My thinking just doesn’t resemble ‘hearing’ or sound in anyway. I’m just aware of a concept and become aware of the words that would describe said concept.
That’s how I think of anything at all, from horses to numerical subtraction, from my sons face to the concept of nothingness. No images, no sounds, no sensory representation in my thoughts at all. I’m just aware of the concepts.
As I hear many do. That, to me, seems so alien. The concept of hearing a ‘voice’ in your head is an experience that I lack even the capacity to imagine.
As I hear many do. That, to me, seems so alien. The concept of hearing a ‘voice’ in your head is an experience that I lack even the capacity to imagine.
Well, you interest me because honestly I assumed that people who didn't hear their thoughts or visualize things were less capable of abstract reasoning. And I guess that's wrong. So it's fascinating to me. I thought being able to have a conversation in one's head was necessary for such intellectual work. I figured that folks like you were more concrete thinkers.
If you lack an internal monologue, and this is an extremely broad question, what goes on in your head on a daily basis? How do you organize your day? How do you get stuff done?
I don't really know how to answer that. I've never known any different. From my perspective, the process of day to day thinking, or imagination in general, isn't in anyway contingent on imagery or voices in my head. Thoughts are just conceptualizations, nothing more. There's no representation of them in my head in any way. The best i can describe it is I'm just aware of concepts existing
I'm sure you hear this a lot, but I cannot imagine not "seeing" things in my mind (I'm probably a 2 on the scale). That's how I write: I visualize the place, the action, the whatever, and describe what I'm seeing.
When reading other books, I create an image with the basic descriptions that are given and once it gets beyond the basics, I start to ignore/forget it. Clothes are easily forgotten (whoops!) and unless there's been an adaptation and I can pop the actor in my mind, I can't create new faces. Instead, I let their personality "shape" a face, so if the character is bland or shallow, I will say that the book has poor characterization.
What about audiobooks? Does a good narrator change your experience?
Yeah I do hear that all the time. I been running experiments on my partner, trying to find something that she can't create imagery for. I'm hoping to find something that is inconceivable visually so I can use it to demonstrate how I think of everything. The closest I've come is the question 'What can you see out of your elbow?'. It didn't work, because she visualised an elbow. The next best is 'what do you see when I say the words "Numerical Subtraction". She saw the equation '2-1=1' in writing.
Audiobooks don't change my experience at all and I can't think of any good reason why they would.
I listen to them all the time, but I have to make sure I keep concentrating on the words or else I'll zone out and miss the story, lose my place. But that's equally true of reading. I often have to go back because I was reading the words but not focussing on what they meant contextually.
I'm very curious - what are your dreams like? Do you mostly not remember dreaming since you can't visualize events and places?
Though I'm actually an extremely vivid dreamer, I'm much less visual in my conscious state. When I read visual descriptions, I enjoy the beauty of the way the words sound almost as much, sometimes more, than the pictures they paint. I pay special attention to rhythm and the flow created by the word choices. I love paragraphs that sound like songs. The descriptions that bring me the most joy, to read and write, are ones about sensations or emotions.
I resonate with your experience of lyric like prose being aesthetically pleasing and enjoyable to read. That's what I look for the most in anything I read. So glad you mentioned it.
As for the dream thing, I'm working on a post that addresses that but I'll lay out the broad strokes here...
I remember my dreams, that is to say, I am aware that I had been experiencing a dream, approximately twice a year by my estimation. So the answer to your second question is BINGO, RIGHT ON THE MONEY!
It's always been that way. 363 mornings or so a year I wake up and have no idea if I had dreamt or not. On the rare occasions I am aware I have dreamt, it is the same as any waking experience. I know it happened and remember facts and data-based descriptions of the events ('I was in a room with 3 windows' or 'I was running through a forest'), but i can 'see' or 'hear' any of it after the fact. I'm just aware that that was what happened.
On these biannual occasions, I do always seem to remember that in the dream, I had no idea it was a facsimile or simulation of reality, and for all intents and purposes was absolutely convinced I was in the real world, no matter how strange it was. I wake up and without fail think 'Of course it was a dream! Fried eggs don't talk in the real world. How could I have possibly believed such nonsense so vehemently?'
It always blows my mind.
Occasionally (every two or three years), I'll have a nightmare and wake up in the middle of it. I remember those in the same data based way for a few minutes but they fade rapidly.
That is all very interesting. I can't imagine only remembering parts of a couple dreams per year. I wonder how dreams or lack of them affect sleep quality. I've never looked into it.
If I may suggest: do not despair, this is not a scale 1-5. It’s at best a measure of some default state that can be changed, although some people naturally are much more visual, and don’t require training.
In my case I’m a 1-2 most of the time. Except when flow states arrive. When music, book or event make a strong impact, when sex or awe block the thinking strata of the mind, it changes.
Imagery comes.
When I was young I found that certain illness, when temperature is high, pushes this into 3-4.
Then later in life I’ve experienced THC (edibles, I do not recommend smoking for health reasons). It was pretty much a cure. The amount of visual thinking that started to happen was so high.
Anyway, I wish you find your own set of tools and practices that work for you, but please do not put yourself in the simplistic categories from the internet charts, our mind is much more complex that than, and we have more leeway that we think.
Thank you for the comment but I must disagree. If there was a -5 on the scale I would be there. In the 5 years or so I’ve been researching this, it is clear that some patients appear to completely lack even the slightest capacity for mental imagery.
I have also been reading DMT research of Aphants consuming ayahuasca. A subset of them get no imagery from even DMT.
Obviously I could be wrong, but I have seen no evidence that I am. Some things, it seems, are definitively scaled at ZERO. Like my imagery.
Finally someone said it! I don’t get why people always compare books to movies. Even with Game of Thrones, which I’ve read, there are things the show did well, like how they made Cersei more human. Both are just different versions, and each gets creative freedom. That said, I do think the last three seasons of the show were pretty bad, but that’s another topic! What’s your favorite book?
Very engaging read! I can't visualize what it would be like to not visualize stuff. I'm a strong 1 on that scale. I'm one of those who was so impressed by how well Jackson brought the Middle Earth of my imagination to life. Do you have a compensating superpower?
You said no inner monologue, either? How do you write? And write so well? I'm hearing as I type (and paying attention to it now just made it noticeable and weird).
I hear from a lot of people that they have no way of comprehending a complete absence of mental imagery. A thought experiment I did hear to demonstrate it to a 'visualiser' is 'Imagine something that you cannot perceive with the material senses, like emotional states or the concept of nothingness. What does loneliness look like? What can you see out of your elbow?' Try to envisage the answer to a question that can't be answered because it has no answer. That's what happens when I try to visualise anything. I think in concepts, soundless, colourless, lightless concepts. The idea of a horse is the same in my mind as that of the concept of numerical subtraction.
The superpower question is funny. There is a lot of research that suggests we might be innoculated against post traumatic stress in some way, but it is heavily contested. I don't really suffer from stagefright when I perform. All lot of performers I know say bad performances play on their minds and restrict them but I just brush them off. There's the grief thing. which is linked to the PTSD research. Aphants are very present in the moment as they can do nothing else but live firmly in it. In my experience, we a disproportionately atheistic, (philosophical) materialists and realists who rarely engage in magical thinking at all. A lot of us can't even comprehend believing in something that isn't materially demonstrable in the here and now, at least that's what I've found.
I have never had an internal monologue and was astonished to find out that people walk around talking to themselves in their head all the time like JD from SCRUBS. No wonder people get caught up in 'Main Character Syndrome' if that's what they're doing all the time.
I can't hear music in my head either, something that broke every brain at the university where I studied music. Solfege, intonation and finding the right pitch in the mind before a cue are impossible for me and one of my professors said he couldn't understand how I was able to write or play music at all without the capacity to audiate (think in music), let along improvise. I can't explain it either.
The odd thing is I can visualize those things you listed. Or at least visual metaphors for them — a sad old person for loneliness, for instance (it seeming to me more poignant to be both old and lonely). We're on opposite ends of that spectrum, which I find fascinating (that there is such a wide spectrum).
The stage fright thing makes sense. You don't visualize totally imaginary (and improbable) failure scenarios, so why worry? I can see some advantages to not visualizing negative predictions, especially the unlikely ones that can plague some of us. Those can be paralyzing for those who have them vividly.
Heh. You probably know that people with an inner monologue find it just as astonishing to discover people who don't. You've no doubt encountered the common reaction of disbelief. I think it opens some very interesting doors about what it means to be conscious -- what's really required... or not.
How do you determine the melody and chord structure of your tunes? Purely conceptually? Do you write like Bach, with interplays of patterns?
Writing music is exclusively a ‘Trial and Error’ process. Try something and see what I like the sound of. Muscle memory is a big part. My fingers know the scales so well that they find the notes fine when I’m improvising and experimenting.
The opposite end of the spectrum is called Hyperphantasia. I know a few of them and their accounts of their imagery always reads as undiscernible from DMT experiences to me.
This a great read.Thank you.
Thank you. Glad you like it.
I’ve written plenty more articles on the topic of Aphantasia if you’re ever interested in checking them out. I’d happily signpost you towards them if you do. Just let me know. Thanks again
You would not like to read my fiction. When I write anything, I describe in great detail the places, the smells, the sounds, the feeling on your skin. I would think 75% of what I write is descriptive writing. What's funny is that you can still understand what is going on, even without having the picture in your head. Blind imagination is a perfect description of it.
Thank you for talking about it. We tend to think that most people are the same, but we're so different most of the time.
Thank you for reading. Descriptive writing is easily understandable in fiction as it is essentially just information about a thing... Data. But, as I can't visualise it, it is mostly just superfluous to me. I don't need it for the book to serve its function to me, which is to convey a story. But it provides an integral function to neurotypical readers so I appreciate why it is there.
But for me I am only concerned with facts that directly inform the story and the characters therein...
I don't need to know what a room looks like, just what happens to the characters in it.
I don't need to know what colour their hair is, just their motivations, desires, fears, etc.
I don't need to know how dark and creepy Fanghorn Forest is, just how scared the Hobbits are when they are there...
I have tried to include visually descriptive language in my own recent work of fiction that I am serialising on Substack. It was bizarre and counter-intuitive writing about details that I can't see but I have tried to provide an experience where normal visualisers can inhabit the fictional world as book typically do. Problem is, I have no idea if I underdid it or overdid it.
Yes!! This has become such an interesting topic to me. I recently had a conversation with my niece, who explained to me that she has no mental imagery or internal dialogue. I was absolutely floored.
You explain it very well here.
So all that description, all the detail is just superfluous to you. You don’t need it. Wild. Thank You for going into such great detail on the subject.
It might be an interesting article for your Substack… Yours niece’s experiences with Aphantasia and your discovering of it. I know I have had dozens of fascinating conversations about Aphantasia on here since writing about it. People find it very interesting…
Wonderful idea!
Thank you. I have written extensively on Aphantasia, (including my dissertation which is comprehensive) and I know I'm not done. It's an obsession of mine.
Yep. All descriptive language in novels is mostly useless to me. Makes me sad, really.
I can still comprehend that stuff, but I never 'see' any of it.
I would guess I'm halfway across the scale. I couldn't create faces from the book descriptions but I could retain them if I watched the movie first. I'd watch the movie for the visuals and read the book for the story. My brother is a solid one on the scale. He can envision whole 3d scenes in his head far beyond what I can. The best I can do is an image (usally cartoonish in detail)of an object in the center of my mind surround by ever darkening fog.
So interesting! How about numbers? Do you visualise sums, mental arithmetic? I've always had a pattern image of 1-100 in my head in the shape of a clock, then straight up to 20, then the numbers loop across to the left like washing pegged on a line with 30, 40 etc as high points. I never questioned it but it made arithmetic easy as a child - I could just read the answer from the mind picture. I once asked someone else how the numbers looked in their head and they had no idea what I was talking about!
I often get asked 'If you can't see a cat, do you see the word 'CAT'?'
Or they ask 'If you don't hear the words, do you see them. Like, in writing'. In fact someone asked me that today.
But 'seeing' a representation of written words would be still visualising by definition, and I don't see anything. No words as writing, no numbers as symbols, nothing. I have only ever seen black when I close my eyes or tried to imagine anything visual.
As far a doing arithmetic goes, its the same as anything else. I am aware of what the numbers are and what I need to calculate to find the answer and I work it out (slowly because I'm bad at mathematics). At no point in this process do I see anything in my imagination.
I like to read the book first because I invariably like it better.
Then I see what some director came up with, lol.
Compare and contrast the two. Nice. I’d give my right arm to experience that…
How would you define "internal monologue"?
Wow! What a great question.
In truth I would have to say 'I don't know' because the phenomenological experience I am referencing when I use the term is not only something I have never experienced myself but also something I inherently lack the tools to even contemplate.
When I say 'Internal Monologue', I am using it as I find it in the literature I have read on Aphantasia. (Alan Kendle's book 'Aphantasia : Experiences, Insights and Perceptions' and the work of Professor Adam Zeman)
People have used the term in these sources and in real life conversations with me ad nauseum. Many say they are 'talking all the time' in their minds. One friend of mine blamed it for his insomnia; 'I never shut up in my head. It keeps my up every night'.
When I ask them 'Is it like JD in the show 'Scrubs'. Your just walking around, going about your business and narrating everything that's going on to yourself in your head"? An unbelievable amount of people have told me 'Yes! Exactly!' to that question.
From my persepective, its like any other aspect of this condition: I struggle to believe it is real. That most people are going around talking to themselves 24/7 or watching little movies in their heads. I still can't help but feel I am being 'Punk'd': like it's all an elaborate practical joke.
Thanks for commenting...
How do you even write if you don't formulate the words in your mind beforehand?
I think them. My thinking just doesn’t resemble ‘hearing’ or sound in anyway. I’m just aware of a concept and become aware of the words that would describe said concept.
That’s how I think of anything at all, from horses to numerical subtraction, from my sons face to the concept of nothingness. No images, no sounds, no sensory representation in my thoughts at all. I’m just aware of the concepts.
Does that make any sense at all?
Not really, but as you say, "It's just how I experience the world.", for me I hear the words as I type them.
As I hear many do. That, to me, seems so alien. The concept of hearing a ‘voice’ in your head is an experience that I lack even the capacity to imagine.
As I hear many do. That, to me, seems so alien. The concept of hearing a ‘voice’ in your head is an experience that I lack even the capacity to imagine.
Well, you interest me because honestly I assumed that people who didn't hear their thoughts or visualize things were less capable of abstract reasoning. And I guess that's wrong. So it's fascinating to me. I thought being able to have a conversation in one's head was necessary for such intellectual work. I figured that folks like you were more concrete thinkers.
Thanks for the response.
If you lack an internal monologue, and this is an extremely broad question, what goes on in your head on a daily basis? How do you organize your day? How do you get stuff done?
Just curious.
I don't really know how to answer that. I've never known any different. From my perspective, the process of day to day thinking, or imagination in general, isn't in anyway contingent on imagery or voices in my head. Thoughts are just conceptualizations, nothing more. There's no representation of them in my head in any way. The best i can describe it is I'm just aware of concepts existing
Thanks for answering!
I'm sure you hear this a lot, but I cannot imagine not "seeing" things in my mind (I'm probably a 2 on the scale). That's how I write: I visualize the place, the action, the whatever, and describe what I'm seeing.
When reading other books, I create an image with the basic descriptions that are given and once it gets beyond the basics, I start to ignore/forget it. Clothes are easily forgotten (whoops!) and unless there's been an adaptation and I can pop the actor in my mind, I can't create new faces. Instead, I let their personality "shape" a face, so if the character is bland or shallow, I will say that the book has poor characterization.
What about audiobooks? Does a good narrator change your experience?
Yeah I do hear that all the time. I been running experiments on my partner, trying to find something that she can't create imagery for. I'm hoping to find something that is inconceivable visually so I can use it to demonstrate how I think of everything. The closest I've come is the question 'What can you see out of your elbow?'. It didn't work, because she visualised an elbow. The next best is 'what do you see when I say the words "Numerical Subtraction". She saw the equation '2-1=1' in writing.
Audiobooks don't change my experience at all and I can't think of any good reason why they would.
I listen to them all the time, but I have to make sure I keep concentrating on the words or else I'll zone out and miss the story, lose my place. But that's equally true of reading. I often have to go back because I was reading the words but not focussing on what they meant contextually.
Thanks for commenting...
I'm very curious - what are your dreams like? Do you mostly not remember dreaming since you can't visualize events and places?
Though I'm actually an extremely vivid dreamer, I'm much less visual in my conscious state. When I read visual descriptions, I enjoy the beauty of the way the words sound almost as much, sometimes more, than the pictures they paint. I pay special attention to rhythm and the flow created by the word choices. I love paragraphs that sound like songs. The descriptions that bring me the most joy, to read and write, are ones about sensations or emotions.
I resonate with your experience of lyric like prose being aesthetically pleasing and enjoyable to read. That's what I look for the most in anything I read. So glad you mentioned it.
As for the dream thing, I'm working on a post that addresses that but I'll lay out the broad strokes here...
I remember my dreams, that is to say, I am aware that I had been experiencing a dream, approximately twice a year by my estimation. So the answer to your second question is BINGO, RIGHT ON THE MONEY!
It's always been that way. 363 mornings or so a year I wake up and have no idea if I had dreamt or not. On the rare occasions I am aware I have dreamt, it is the same as any waking experience. I know it happened and remember facts and data-based descriptions of the events ('I was in a room with 3 windows' or 'I was running through a forest'), but i can 'see' or 'hear' any of it after the fact. I'm just aware that that was what happened.
On these biannual occasions, I do always seem to remember that in the dream, I had no idea it was a facsimile or simulation of reality, and for all intents and purposes was absolutely convinced I was in the real world, no matter how strange it was. I wake up and without fail think 'Of course it was a dream! Fried eggs don't talk in the real world. How could I have possibly believed such nonsense so vehemently?'
It always blows my mind.
Occasionally (every two or three years), I'll have a nightmare and wake up in the middle of it. I remember those in the same data based way for a few minutes but they fade rapidly.
Thanks for commenting...
That is all very interesting. I can't imagine only remembering parts of a couple dreams per year. I wonder how dreams or lack of them affect sleep quality. I've never looked into it.
If I may suggest: do not despair, this is not a scale 1-5. It’s at best a measure of some default state that can be changed, although some people naturally are much more visual, and don’t require training.
In my case I’m a 1-2 most of the time. Except when flow states arrive. When music, book or event make a strong impact, when sex or awe block the thinking strata of the mind, it changes.
Imagery comes.
When I was young I found that certain illness, when temperature is high, pushes this into 3-4.
Then later in life I’ve experienced THC (edibles, I do not recommend smoking for health reasons). It was pretty much a cure. The amount of visual thinking that started to happen was so high.
Anyway, I wish you find your own set of tools and practices that work for you, but please do not put yourself in the simplistic categories from the internet charts, our mind is much more complex that than, and we have more leeway that we think.
Thank you for the comment but I must disagree. If there was a -5 on the scale I would be there. In the 5 years or so I’ve been researching this, it is clear that some patients appear to completely lack even the slightest capacity for mental imagery.
I have also been reading DMT research of Aphants consuming ayahuasca. A subset of them get no imagery from even DMT.
Obviously I could be wrong, but I have seen no evidence that I am. Some things, it seems, are definitively scaled at ZERO. Like my imagery.
This is so interesting and well explained.
Thank you.
Finally someone said it! I don’t get why people always compare books to movies. Even with Game of Thrones, which I’ve read, there are things the show did well, like how they made Cersei more human. Both are just different versions, and each gets creative freedom. That said, I do think the last three seasons of the show were pretty bad, but that’s another topic! What’s your favorite book?
Fiction - Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
Non-Fiction - Christopher Hitchens gOD IS NOT GREAT
Very engaging read! I can't visualize what it would be like to not visualize stuff. I'm a strong 1 on that scale. I'm one of those who was so impressed by how well Jackson brought the Middle Earth of my imagination to life. Do you have a compensating superpower?
You said no inner monologue, either? How do you write? And write so well? I'm hearing as I type (and paying attention to it now just made it noticeable and weird).
Thank you for your kind words, good sir.
I hear from a lot of people that they have no way of comprehending a complete absence of mental imagery. A thought experiment I did hear to demonstrate it to a 'visualiser' is 'Imagine something that you cannot perceive with the material senses, like emotional states or the concept of nothingness. What does loneliness look like? What can you see out of your elbow?' Try to envisage the answer to a question that can't be answered because it has no answer. That's what happens when I try to visualise anything. I think in concepts, soundless, colourless, lightless concepts. The idea of a horse is the same in my mind as that of the concept of numerical subtraction.
The superpower question is funny. There is a lot of research that suggests we might be innoculated against post traumatic stress in some way, but it is heavily contested. I don't really suffer from stagefright when I perform. All lot of performers I know say bad performances play on their minds and restrict them but I just brush them off. There's the grief thing. which is linked to the PTSD research. Aphants are very present in the moment as they can do nothing else but live firmly in it. In my experience, we a disproportionately atheistic, (philosophical) materialists and realists who rarely engage in magical thinking at all. A lot of us can't even comprehend believing in something that isn't materially demonstrable in the here and now, at least that's what I've found.
I have never had an internal monologue and was astonished to find out that people walk around talking to themselves in their head all the time like JD from SCRUBS. No wonder people get caught up in 'Main Character Syndrome' if that's what they're doing all the time.
I can't hear music in my head either, something that broke every brain at the university where I studied music. Solfege, intonation and finding the right pitch in the mind before a cue are impossible for me and one of my professors said he couldn't understand how I was able to write or play music at all without the capacity to audiate (think in music), let along improvise. I can't explain it either.
Sorry, long reply. Thanks again
The odd thing is I can visualize those things you listed. Or at least visual metaphors for them — a sad old person for loneliness, for instance (it seeming to me more poignant to be both old and lonely). We're on opposite ends of that spectrum, which I find fascinating (that there is such a wide spectrum).
The stage fright thing makes sense. You don't visualize totally imaginary (and improbable) failure scenarios, so why worry? I can see some advantages to not visualizing negative predictions, especially the unlikely ones that can plague some of us. Those can be paralyzing for those who have them vividly.
Heh. You probably know that people with an inner monologue find it just as astonishing to discover people who don't. You've no doubt encountered the common reaction of disbelief. I think it opens some very interesting doors about what it means to be conscious -- what's really required... or not.
How do you determine the melody and chord structure of your tunes? Purely conceptually? Do you write like Bach, with interplays of patterns?
Writing music is exclusively a ‘Trial and Error’ process. Try something and see what I like the sound of. Muscle memory is a big part. My fingers know the scales so well that they find the notes fine when I’m improvising and experimenting.
The opposite end of the spectrum is called Hyperphantasia. I know a few of them and their accounts of their imagery always reads as undiscernible from DMT experiences to me.