You may be interested in this essay by Blake Ross, cofounder of Firefox and ex-director of product at Facebook, on discovering he had aphantasia, an insight that explained a million little things about his own personal experiences that seemed amiss relative to others. Quoting some passages (attention conservation notice—there’s ~1,000 words below):
How do you write fiction if you can’t visualize scenes?
I “imagine” scripts conceptually as described earlier. It’s easier to write for characters that have already been realized on the screen, especially when so many of them share my dry, sarcastic personality. If you reread the Silicon Valley script, you’ll find it’s heavy on ideas (what if a lawyer had a clock that counted money not time? what if Erlich compiled interview questions while stoned?) and light on descriptive language. Same with the Theranos parody.
Overall, I find writing fiction torturous. All writers say this, obviously, but I’ve come to realize that they usually mean the “writing” part: They can’t stop daydreaming long enough to put it on the page. I love the writing and hate the imagining, which is why I churn out 50 dry essays for every nugget of fiction.
...
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.
Nobody likes an author who shows off, of course. But friends tell me it is the written imagery—when done well—that delivers the very joy of reading. I can’t understand that, but I finally understand this: You really are annoyed with the actor in 50 Shades of Grey. It’s really not how you pictured him in the book.
...
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.
Apologies for quoting all of that, and it’s not quite an answer to “how do people with Aphantasia read texts and process while studying?”, but what Blake wrote resonated pretty deeply with me—I’m partially aphantasic, strong on conceptual imagination but a lot weaker than most on visual-auditory.
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.
This resonates so hard for me! When writing fiction I’ve always felt a bit like I’m doing it wrong because I write almost solely about the characters’ feelings, motivations, and internal monologuing. Visual descriptions are something I shoehorn in because I feel like I’m supposed to have them, and figuring out the blocking of a scene is always a nightmare (has this person stood up yet? how far away are they from the thing they need to go touch?) – it feels totally extraneous; I just want the characters to take the plot-relevant actions and not have to figure out where they’re standing when they do it! God forbid I ever try to write a fight scene. That would not go well...
So yeah thanks for the link; I really like the essay!
Because I find it difficult to imagine how such person could function in everyday life. Like, they go to a shop and they don’t remember what they wanted to buy? Or is it different if they decide in advance that it is important to remember the shopping list, and the “don’t know” only applies to things they did not consciously choose to remember? Or is keeping written notes a necessary coping mechanism?
I think it used to apply to me more – as a kid if people asked me something along the lines of “what did you do today?” I would automatically say “I don’t know,” and then if I thought they wanted a real answer, I would think for a bit. But I could almost always answer after thinking for a couple seconds.
I think part of your confusion comes from conflating experiential memory with verbal memory. In the essay, he also mentions that he’s really good at remembering arbitrary sequences of digits; I presume that extends to things such as grocery lists, and possibly also intentions that he’s formed. For me, I have very few memories of my childhood or even specific experiential memories of more recent years, but I have no trouble remembering what I need to do in a day.
(I do keep a LOT of lists and always have. But I have no idea if this is related.)
Being around people who value talking about abstract things makes me more attuned to the “word content” of the day. It’s like, I can remember going to work on a sunny day or I can remember someone asking her colleague “how do you see/define the depth of a surface in a painting”.
Normally I would say it happens and people forget details. But his case seems like he has a biological issue. I think something serious is happening to him.
I suspect personality, skill level, and now aphantasia in your case impacted on fiction writing. Right now, I put personality as the top reason for this. I like comic books and web comics, thus my fiction consists of a series of images and motions in my head, and I don’t really write them down in texts. In this path, I am also not confident of writing a description with a variety of vocabulary. Oh, at the end, lack of time is the main issue, sadly;)
Fascinating! My first “thought” on reading the description was that I see the golden background around the olive-skinned man, like on an old painting, and I know how his body is tilted. Then, “there’s an assassin”. What? :) I mean, sure he’s an assassin, but let’s not be hasty here :)
And this reminds me of how some writers compress visual imagery. Pratchett’s “complex interplay of forces” (when a man throws a dagger, I think in the beginning of “The Pyramids”) really did a lot for me. It’s the successional character of the movement, half-conscious but ever so controlled, so living-muscle, which draws the attention very tightly and maybe makes imagination cheaper in the process.
The essay has several shocking parts. I enjoyed reading it.
Besides being aphantasia, I like short, easy and clear writings, few sentences summarizings, and facts without decorations. Generally that is journalism writing. And if this is related to aphantasia...that’s interesting.
Although I am not an aphantasia, I agree that fiction writing will be impacted by it, in addition to limited vocabulary, lack of practice, etc. And the graphic art will be the same case, as reference images and its mental processing are important.
You may be interested in this essay by Blake Ross, cofounder of Firefox and ex-director of product at Facebook, on discovering he had aphantasia, an insight that explained a million little things about his own personal experiences that seemed amiss relative to others. Quoting some passages (attention conservation notice—there’s ~1,000 words below):
Apologies for quoting all of that, and it’s not quite an answer to “how do people with Aphantasia read texts and process while studying?”, but what Blake wrote resonated pretty deeply with me—I’m partially aphantasic, strong on conceptual imagination but a lot weaker than most on visual-auditory.
Whoa...
This resonates so hard for me! When writing fiction I’ve always felt a bit like I’m doing it wrong because I write almost solely about the characters’ feelings, motivations, and internal monologuing. Visual descriptions are something I shoehorn in because I feel like I’m supposed to have them, and figuring out the blocking of a scene is always a nightmare (has this person stood up yet? how far away are they from the thing they need to go touch?) – it feels totally extraneous; I just want the characters to take the plot-relevant actions and not have to figure out where they’re standing when they do it! God forbid I ever try to write a fight scene. That would not go well...
So yeah thanks for the link; I really like the essay!
Does this also apply to you?
Because I find it difficult to imagine how such person could function in everyday life. Like, they go to a shop and they don’t remember what they wanted to buy? Or is it different if they decide in advance that it is important to remember the shopping list, and the “don’t know” only applies to things they did not consciously choose to remember? Or is keeping written notes a necessary coping mechanism?
I think it used to apply to me more – as a kid if people asked me something along the lines of “what did you do today?” I would automatically say “I don’t know,” and then if I thought they wanted a real answer, I would think for a bit. But I could almost always answer after thinking for a couple seconds.
I think part of your confusion comes from conflating experiential memory with verbal memory. In the essay, he also mentions that he’s really good at remembering arbitrary sequences of digits; I presume that extends to things such as grocery lists, and possibly also intentions that he’s formed. For me, I have very few memories of my childhood or even specific experiential memories of more recent years, but I have no trouble remembering what I need to do in a day.
(I do keep a LOT of lists and always have. But I have no idea if this is related.)
Being around people who value talking about abstract things makes me more attuned to the “word content” of the day. It’s like, I can remember going to work on a sunny day or I can remember someone asking her colleague “how do you see/define the depth of a surface in a painting”.
Normally I would say it happens and people forget details. But his case seems like he has a biological issue. I think something serious is happening to him.
I suspect personality, skill level, and now aphantasia in your case impacted on fiction writing. Right now, I put personality as the top reason for this. I like comic books and web comics, thus my fiction consists of a series of images and motions in my head, and I don’t really write them down in texts. In this path, I am also not confident of writing a description with a variety of vocabulary. Oh, at the end, lack of time is the main issue, sadly;)
Fascinating! My first “thought” on reading the description was that I see the golden background around the olive-skinned man, like on an old painting, and I know how his body is tilted. Then, “there’s an assassin”. What? :) I mean, sure he’s an assassin, but let’s not be hasty here :)
And this reminds me of how some writers compress visual imagery. Pratchett’s “complex interplay of forces” (when a man throws a dagger, I think in the beginning of “The Pyramids”) really did a lot for me. It’s the successional character of the movement, half-conscious but ever so controlled, so living-muscle, which draws the attention very tightly and maybe makes imagination cheaper in the process.
The essay has several shocking parts. I enjoyed reading it.
Besides being aphantasia, I like short, easy and clear writings, few sentences summarizings, and facts without decorations. Generally that is journalism writing. And if this is related to aphantasia...that’s interesting.
Although I am not an aphantasia, I agree that fiction writing will be impacted by it, in addition to limited vocabulary, lack of practice, etc. And the graphic art will be the same case, as reference images and its mental processing are important.