While I don’t have aphantasia, I resonated oddly strongly with Mozilla cofounder Blake Ross’ description of his discovery that he was aphantasic:
And, suddenly, fiction clicks. Paty says I used to worry that “I feel like I’m doing reading wrong.” Descriptive language in novels was important to her but impotent to me; I skip it as reflexively as you skip the iTunes Terms of Service. Instead, I scour fiction like an archaeologist: Find the bones.
The slender, olive-skinned man brushed the golden locks out of his hazel eyes. He was so focused on preparing for the assassination that he burned his tongue on the scalding cuppa joe (hazelnut, light cream).
That becomes:
There’s an assassin.
I hurdle over paragraphs and pages, mowing down novels in one night because—while others make love to the olive-skinned assassin—I’m just fucking his skeleton. Some books are so fleshy they’re opaque: Lord of the Rings numbs. But Lord of the Flies gnaws, because I could meditate on the idea of society-gone-wild forever. Animal Farm is awesome. 1984. The splendor of Hogwarts is lost, but the idea of a dementor is brain fuel. And 2 + 2 = 5.
But above all, strangely, I feel relief. It is vindication in some lifelong battle against an enemy I could never find.
I’ve always felt an incomprehensible combination of stupid-smart. I missed a single question on the SATs, yet the easiest conceivable question stumps me: What was it like growing up in Miami?
I don’t know.
What were some of your favorite experiences at Facebook?
I don’t know.
What did you do today?
I don’t know. I don’t know what I did today.
Answering questions like this requires me to “do mental work,” the way you might if you’re struggling to recall what happened in the Battle of Trafalgar. If I haven’t prepared, I can’t begin to answer. But chitchat is the lubricant of everyday life. I learned early that you can’t excuse yourself from the party to focus on recalling what you did 2 hours ago.
So I compensate. Ask about Miami and I’ll tell you, almost to a syllable:
I didn’t love it. It’s very hot, the people there aren’t ambitious at all. Also everyone is kind of angry, there’s like a lot of road rage. It’s fun to visit but I basically went as far away as I could for college, ha ha.
Facebook?
It was awesome getting to be there in the early days. I remember I would practically run to work in the mornings because I was so excited to share ideas with the team. There’s really no better feeling than seeing someone in a coffee shop using your work.
These lines are practiced. They are composites of facts I know and things I’ve read. I perform them out of body, with the same spiritual deadness that you might recount the Battle of Trafalgar.
And if you ask about my day, there’s a good chance that—having had no time to prepare—I’ll lie to you.
It is hard not to feel like a sociopath when you’re lying about how you spent your Monday and you don’t even know why. And there is a sadness, an unflagging detachment that comes from forgetting your own existence. My college girlfriend passed away. Now I cannot “see” So-Youn’s face or any of the times we shared together.
I have, in fact, no memories of college.
I once proposed to Paty that, since we were visiting my brother in DC anyway, let’s train over to the Big Apple and see Les Misérables. She said, we did that last year—for my birthday.
Often I ask my oldest friend to tell me about my childhood. Stephen and I joke that we’re the couple in The Notebook, but there’s an undercurrent of: Am I an idiot?
I’ve always chalked this up to having “bad experiential memory,” a notion I pulled out of thin air because “bad memory” doesn’t fit: I can recite the full to-do list of software I’m building. On a childhood IQ test, my best performances were on Coding and Digit Span, both memory-driven. Given an increasingly long string of random numbers, I hit the test ceiling by repeating and then reversing 20 digits from memory on the fly. My three worst performances were on Picture Completion, Picture Arrangement, and Object Assembly. I couldn’t put the damn images in order to save my life.
Perhaps none of this is aphantasia. But when I ask a friend how he how-was-your-days, he gives me a tour of the visualizations in his mind. The spaghetti bolognese; the bike ride through the marsh; the argument with the boss, and the boss’s shit-eating grin, and gosh how I’d love to punch him in the mouth, and can’t you just see it now? He says that looking back on his life is like paging through a Google Image search sorted by “most engaging.” He tells me that when he’s on the road, and loneliness knocks, and the damn Doubletree bed is a little more wooden than usual, he replays the time they tried to make sushi together—but the rice kept falling apart!—and we couldn’t stop laughing!—and did you know it burns when sake spews out your nose?—and that’s when she feels closer.
I wonder if it’s why I have such an easy time letting go of people.
Ross is effortlessly microhumorous, but I also couldn’t help feeling sad reading his post, both for how much he’d missed out on and for how much the “incomprehensible combination of stupid-smart” thing resonated, right down to the fiction consumption mode / preference and social compensatory strategies and letting go of people I used to know and fiercely love.
The last image in Ross’ post is a DM of an exchange with a friend, one of 74 such exchanges he had after his discovery from this NYT piece that aphantasia was a thing and that the vast majority of people don’t have it:
Friend: … imagination. Now I see my dad and I see my phone at the same time. I have no idea what made me think of my dad.
Ross: How many times a day would you say this “visual” component of your brain/imagination is active?
Friend: All the time Friend: Even when I sleep Friend: That’s what makes us human right?
Sometimes I think about the arguments about LLMs being conscious/not conscious because they have X or don’t have Y capability, and then I think about this. I wonder sometimes if they knew what it was like, people would consider this “less than human”. Quite like your last paragraph here.
Thanks, this resonated with me too and was I had never heard about it before! I was doing more research into it., and there seems to be the opposite of this called HSAM or highly superior autobiographical memorywhere some people can vividly relive their life given just a specific date like April 15, 1995. However, it seems to be less common (only 100 people diagnosed with it worldwide)
That made this whole thing feel even more alien to me.
The blank I drew with my grandfather is just an example of what you might call a “memory void.” It’s not that I tend to forget people. Indeed, my loved ones are safe in my mind, albeit in that intangible and elusive form, with no risk of being forgotten—more on this later. My memory voids are specifically about the concrete things I did in my life.
Ask me how my childhood was, or if I had fun in my twenties, and all I can answer is “I think so.” Not because I wasn’t sure about it at the time, but because I don’t remember what I thought of it. With such broad and general questions, I have almost no hope of coming up with representative memories to help me answer those questions. No flashbacks to times I thought “this is great!” nor to moments of sadness. Again, many such events are buried as facts and observations somewhere in my memory, but that’s not how I can recover them.
My past feels like someone else’s. I know a great deal about it, more than anyone else in fact, yet I don’t remember being in it. I can create a year-by-year history of my whole life with information such as the places I lived in, the schools I went to, the major turning points in my life; I can explain many facts about the key people and events of each time period; I can even arrange many of these in the form of stories or ordered stages of growth—yet none of this feels like things I did. It’s like being the world’s top expert about a stranger’s life.
I don’t have a problem with imagination. I write books that are often praised for clear and evocative visual description. I’m asked by people if I’ve climbed rock faces, fought with swords or even had cancer, because my descriptions of these experiences have convinced people who have actually lived them that I must have, too. (I haven’t.)
I also recall Stanisław Lem, the science fiction author, mentioning in one of his nonfiction books that he never visualizes anything when he writes (or reads, I don’t remember) visual descriptions. He wrote this some 50 years ago, so aphantasia wasn’t recognized at the time, but it sounds like he had it. I’ve read most of his novels, but I’m unsure whether he included fewer visual descriptions than comparable authors. Mark Lawrence says he doesn’t know whether aphantasia affects his writing style.
That really doesn’t sound like the inability to visualize. Whatever it is it seems to be something else
Here’s an example. My dad was talking to my youngest brother who was saying he didn’t like the Lord of the Rings movies because the actors didn’t look like the way he imagined them. My dad got confused and asked what my brother meant. My brother said, ” you know, when you’re reading and in your mind you see a stage or theatre and the people are acting out the scenes you’re reading? The people in the movie look different than the people in my head. ” My dad turned to me in shock and said, “I’ve never heard of this, do you have a little theatre in your head? ” And I said that no I don’t. My brother and dad kept talking where my dad was asking for examples and details of what it was like to imagine things visually. I lost interest because I had long ago realized my friends thought the line about “try not to visualize a pink elephant” made sense and I had long since stopped asking teachers why they thought that lesson worked.
I dream, but there’s nothing to see. It’s just narrative and touch. The me in the dream isn’t blind, and can interact with things, but the me that is conscious of the dream can’t see. I know the plot, I know what the dream me is reaching for. That’s just awareness not vision.
If you ask me what color pink is, I know what to say, but I can’t see it unless there’s some around us I can point to.
This is lack of visualizing. Whatever Ross is experiencing goes far beyond this.
I also don’t have aphantasia and can relate to that description a lot.
When I was eight or nine we had to draw our family at school. My friend glanced over and said: Doesn’t your mom wear glasses? I didn’t know and really had no way to figure this out except by going home and looking at my mom (who has been wearing glasses all day and every day since she was a kid).
On one cognitive test I scored 99.9th percentile in logical thinking and 23rd percentile in image memory (which explains why I get lost everywhere). My coworkers think I’m a genius, my wife thinks I’m retarded.
I also read books like Ross does and never understood my fellow nerds obsession with maps, which seem like a complete waste of a page to me.
When I visually remember people I almost always remember a foto of them which I have seen many times. I dislike new places but moving to a new apartment is basically no problem—after a week or two I have forgotten the old place.
I used to think that other people experience life as a series of anecdotes, while I just don’t. Though over the years I did figure out how to tell anecdotes (preparation).
I guess I can count myself lucky that in my case this is not as extreme as for Blake Ross.
Hmmm, I really can’t relate to this at all. I still kind of struggle to believe people like this exist (I do believe it, but despite having tried interrogating aphantasiac people I find, I’ve never gotten a good sense of what it feels like from the inside).
It would be easier for me to imagine if these people were profoundly retarded. But I haven’t seen any indication that they have any functional deficiency.
Like, for me, autobiographical memory and visualization is a very core part of how my mind functions. Like if I’m at the store, and try to remember what food items I need to buy, I visualize how my kitchen looks, and see if anything is missing.
Or if I get paranoid about whether I remembered to lock the door to my home, I just kind of, remember, and then a “video” of me locking the door appears, and then I know I locked it.
When I tell aphantasiacs this, and ask them what goes on in their mind when they do the same task, they either tell me that they just write down stuff beforehand, or they tell me what they need just pops into their heads unconsciously.
Which I find hard to believe to be honest. Like, it doesn’t make sense that minds would have two fundamentally different ways to achieve the same task.
The only area where I’ve noted some deficiency is, asking them heavily 3-d geometric questions like “If you have a mirror in your bathroom, how many of them would you need to stack horizontally to span the width of the wall the mirror is hanging on?”. But even non-aphantasiacs have problems with that.
I’ve heard the explanation that aphantasiacs do have all the machinery, and do the visualization thing, but that the visualization is not accessible. I find that hard to believe. I’ve also heard people say the opposite. That visualization actually isn’t loadbearing, its just a kind of post-hoc narrativization. That’s also hard for me to believe.
Yeah, the friends and family Blake Ross reached out to would’ve probably shared your incredulity, like that last friend who ended with how always-on visualisation is “what makes us human, right?”
I’ve only met one full-blown aphantasiac in my life, a pure math postdoc at I think UC Berkeley. He could not visualise a rotating cube to save his life, and flunked the shape rotator sections of the IQ test he was administered as a child. But algebra was “ridiculously easy” to him, so that’s what he ended up specialising in.
I have no problems with visual imagination, and suspect I am better than average. Reading descriptions in fiction really does paint a picture/movie scene in my head.
At the same time, I think I have a worse episodic memory than most. It sounds like it’s not as bad as Ross’s, but it’s in the same ballpark.
I suspect the following:
‘Dissociative tendencies’, that are something more fundamental even though I live a happy life now.
ADHD (I have an official diagnosis and believe myself to fit the description, and take medication), as supposedly that is associated with worse episodic memory.
An ‘ideas’ focus, over a ‘embodied’ focus, even when talking with friends. Of course I don’t remember what I ate for lunch, I was thinking about something exciting!
Instead of talking about what I did today (unless it was something easy to remember, like if I did something unusual), I instead just say something interesting that I’ve been thinking about, and if the other person plays along we’ll talk about that. I ask the same of others, if they end up saying that they did nothing today.
I can barely remember my mom or dad’s face. Thankfully, they are still alive; but it’s likely that when they die, I’ll have to look at a picture to put their face in my mind.
Ultimately, I have simply decided to say “So what if I’m detached?” I remember enough, and the experiences are still valuable for having happened. Ruminating too much on it does me no good, so I should just live for current and future experiences.
While I don’t have aphantasia, I resonated oddly strongly with Mozilla cofounder Blake Ross’ description of his discovery that he was aphantasic:
Ross is effortlessly microhumorous, but I also couldn’t help feeling sad reading his post, both for how much he’d missed out on and for how much the “incomprehensible combination of stupid-smart” thing resonated, right down to the fiction consumption mode / preference and social compensatory strategies and letting go of people I used to know and fiercely love.
The last image in Ross’ post is a DM of an exchange with a friend, one of 74 such exchanges he had after his discovery from this NYT piece that aphantasia was a thing and that the vast majority of people don’t have it:
This may go beyond aphantasia and to something called Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM). It looks like our understanding of SDAM is still in its infancy though.
Sometimes I think about the arguments about LLMs being conscious/not conscious because they have X or don’t have Y capability, and then I think about this. I wonder sometimes if they knew what it was like, people would consider this “less than human”. Quite like your last paragraph here.
Thanks, this resonated with me too and was I had never heard about it before! I was doing more research into it., and there seems to be the opposite of this called HSAM or highly superior autobiographical memory where some people can vividly relive their life given just a specific date like April 15, 1995. However, it seems to be less common (only 100 people diagnosed with it worldwide)
That made this whole thing feel even more alien to me.
Yeah this sounds more like SDAM. Here is another self-description blog post of SDAM (via Hacker News).
[Here](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/01/being-an-author-with-aphantasia-mark-lawrence) is an article by Mark Lawrence, a fantasy author with aphantasia. Quote:
I also recall Stanisław Lem, the science fiction author, mentioning in one of his nonfiction books that he never visualizes anything when he writes (or reads, I don’t remember) visual descriptions. He wrote this some 50 years ago, so aphantasia wasn’t recognized at the time, but it sounds like he had it. I’ve read most of his novels, but I’m unsure whether he included fewer visual descriptions than comparable authors. Mark Lawrence says he doesn’t know whether aphantasia affects his writing style.
That really doesn’t sound like the inability to visualize. Whatever it is it seems to be something else
Here’s an example. My dad was talking to my youngest brother who was saying he didn’t like the Lord of the Rings movies because the actors didn’t look like the way he imagined them. My dad got confused and asked what my brother meant. My brother said, ” you know, when you’re reading and in your mind you see a stage or theatre and the people are acting out the scenes you’re reading? The people in the movie look different than the people in my head. ” My dad turned to me in shock and said, “I’ve never heard of this, do you have a little theatre in your head? ” And I said that no I don’t. My brother and dad kept talking where my dad was asking for examples and details of what it was like to imagine things visually. I lost interest because I had long ago realized my friends thought the line about “try not to visualize a pink elephant” made sense and I had long since stopped asking teachers why they thought that lesson worked.
I dream, but there’s nothing to see. It’s just narrative and touch. The me in the dream isn’t blind, and can interact with things, but the me that is conscious of the dream can’t see. I know the plot, I know what the dream me is reaching for. That’s just awareness not vision.
If you ask me what color pink is, I know what to say, but I can’t see it unless there’s some around us I can point to.
This is lack of visualizing. Whatever Ross is experiencing goes far beyond this.
I also don’t have aphantasia and can relate to that description a lot.
When I was eight or nine we had to draw our family at school. My friend glanced over and said: Doesn’t your mom wear glasses? I didn’t know and really had no way to figure this out except by going home and looking at my mom (who has been wearing glasses all day and every day since she was a kid).
On one cognitive test I scored 99.9th percentile in logical thinking and 23rd percentile in image memory (which explains why I get lost everywhere). My coworkers think I’m a genius, my wife thinks I’m retarded.
I also read books like Ross does and never understood my fellow nerds obsession with maps, which seem like a complete waste of a page to me.
When I visually remember people I almost always remember a foto of them which I have seen many times. I dislike new places but moving to a new apartment is basically no problem—after a week or two I have forgotten the old place.
I used to think that other people experience life as a series of anecdotes, while I just don’t. Though over the years I did figure out how to tell anecdotes (preparation).
I guess I can count myself lucky that in my case this is not as extreme as for Blake Ross.
i feel this very strongly. I’m not completely aphantasic, but I’m like 80% of the way there.
Hmmm, I really can’t relate to this at all. I still kind of struggle to believe people like this exist (I do believe it, but despite having tried interrogating aphantasiac people I find, I’ve never gotten a good sense of what it feels like from the inside).
It would be easier for me to imagine if these people were profoundly retarded. But I haven’t seen any indication that they have any functional deficiency.
Like, for me, autobiographical memory and visualization is a very core part of how my mind functions. Like if I’m at the store, and try to remember what food items I need to buy, I visualize how my kitchen looks, and see if anything is missing.
Or if I get paranoid about whether I remembered to lock the door to my home, I just kind of, remember, and then a “video” of me locking the door appears, and then I know I locked it.
When I tell aphantasiacs this, and ask them what goes on in their mind when they do the same task, they either tell me that they just write down stuff beforehand, or they tell me what they need just pops into their heads unconsciously.
Which I find hard to believe to be honest. Like, it doesn’t make sense that minds would have two fundamentally different ways to achieve the same task.
The only area where I’ve noted some deficiency is, asking them heavily 3-d geometric questions like “If you have a mirror in your bathroom, how many of them would you need to stack horizontally to span the width of the wall the mirror is hanging on?”. But even non-aphantasiacs have problems with that.
I’ve heard the explanation that aphantasiacs do have all the machinery, and do the visualization thing, but that the visualization is not accessible. I find that hard to believe. I’ve also heard people say the opposite. That visualization actually isn’t loadbearing, its just a kind of post-hoc narrativization. That’s also hard for me to believe.
Yeah, the friends and family Blake Ross reached out to would’ve probably shared your incredulity, like that last friend who ended with how always-on visualisation is “what makes us human, right?”
I’ve only met one full-blown aphantasiac in my life, a pure math postdoc at I think UC Berkeley. He could not visualise a rotating cube to save his life, and flunked the shape rotator sections of the IQ test he was administered as a child. But algebra was “ridiculously easy” to him, so that’s what he ended up specialising in.
I have no problems with visual imagination, and suspect I am better than average. Reading descriptions in fiction really does paint a picture/movie scene in my head.
At the same time, I think I have a worse episodic memory than most. It sounds like it’s not as bad as Ross’s, but it’s in the same ballpark.
I suspect the following:
‘Dissociative tendencies’, that are something more fundamental even though I live a happy life now.
ADHD (I have an official diagnosis and believe myself to fit the description, and take medication), as supposedly that is associated with worse episodic memory.
An ‘ideas’ focus, over a ‘embodied’ focus, even when talking with friends. Of course I don’t remember what I ate for lunch, I was thinking about something exciting!
Instead of talking about what I did today (unless it was something easy to remember, like if I did something unusual), I instead just say something interesting that I’ve been thinking about, and if the other person plays along we’ll talk about that. I ask the same of others, if they end up saying that they did nothing today.
I can barely remember my mom or dad’s face. Thankfully, they are still alive; but it’s likely that when they die, I’ll have to look at a picture to put their face in my mind.
Ultimately, I have simply decided to say “So what if I’m detached?” I remember enough, and the experiences are still valuable for having happened. Ruminating too much on it does me no good, so I should just live for current and future experiences.
I cannot open the link, is it the same as https://www.facebook.com/notes/2862324277332876/ ?
Oddly enough I can’t open your link, I immediately get redirected back to your comment…
Facebook links are so insanely broken… This is what I see:
So odd. Yeah that’s the article.