I’ve been thinking about how having #aphantasia (inability to form images in my mind) has a relationship with how I process grief.

For example, my beloved dog Cookie passed away in June last year. I grieved her of course, but I legitimately don’t think about her actively unless I look at a photo of her. She’s just not in my brain. Nothing really is.

It’s an interesting way to perceive the world, differently from most of you.

What is in my brain: ideas, words, concepts. I describe the way I think as ‘a wall of text that is floating by, I have to grasp at it to translate some chunk to the world’.

A while back someone shared an article about using #ML to recognize the object a person was visualizing by training the system on their brain patterns while seeing the object.

I wondered at the time if that would work with people with #aphantasia, and suspected it would not.

Well, the verdict is in, and it's even weirder than that.

1. The near visual cortex does activate with patterns when people with aphantasia try to recall an image.
2. But the activation bears no apparent resemblance to what happens when they actually see the object. ML can't decode it.
3. It's on the wrong side of the brain.

The first ones don't surprise me, but the last one is particularly curious. It's one of those things you probably learned in high school. "The left visual cortex receives information from the right eye and visual field. The right visual cortex receives information from the left eye and visual field." Nope. Not for people with aphantasia. For them the processing is on the same side as the eye.

At this point nobody knows what this means. The researcher in the video suggests that maybe the activity in the near visual cortex isn't strong enough to trigger vision. But they also say it's warped in some way that isn't understood.

For me at least, it feels like I'm simply picking out what appear to be salient attributes from the image, rather than an image.* Which makes me wonder whether there's anyone with aphantasia who also doesn't have an internal speaking voice, because I have no idea how I would recall an image if I couldn't talk out a description.

* The other month I was was introduced to and invited to a meetup by a man I talked to. And a month later I was at the meetup and ran into the party organizer and the person who invited me, and thought the first was the second. The person I mistook for who invited me was a tall thin grey haired white man with a beard. The person who did invite me was a middle-aged heavy set black man. Looking back, I realized I'd only registered his outgoing boisterous personality, and that's the thing they both had in common. I'm not face blind, but it takes multiple exposures to someone before I can come up with a reliable recognition algorithm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b38qWjlMAvs

Marco Giancotti’s brain can’t imagine a sunset, the sound of a bell, the smell of bread baking, or little else.
In this fascinating piece for Nautilus, Giancotti introduces us to #aphantasia,
a condition that prevents him from picturing any “kind of sensory stimulation” in his mind.
…as soon as I close my eyes, what I see are not everyday objects, animals, and vehicles, but the dark underside of my eyelids.
I can’t willingly form the faintest of images in my mind.
And, although it isn’t the subject of the current experiment, I also can’t conjure sounds, smells, or any other kind of sensory stimulation inside my head.
I have what is called “aphantasia,” the absence of voluntary imagination of the senses.
My whole life, I’ve been aware
—sometimes painfully so
—of my own peculiarities, strengths, and weaknesses:
A terrible memory, a good sense of direction, and what I felt was a lack of “visual creativity,” among others.
I always thought these were just random, disconnected traits, and didn’t think much about them.
Who doesn’t have their quirks?
https://longreads.com/2023/10/10/my-brain-doesnt-picture-things/

I have #aphantasia and I can’t make visual images in my head. ‘Picture an apple’.. I can’t picture anything. People have asked me how I dream. I don’t have visual dreams.

I just had a dream in which I.. smelled a variety of things. Interesting!

Fascinating research results on #Aphantasia; definitely lines up with my own personal experience! https://youtu.be/m9kLc_-iqIE

Here is a new, shorter version of our mental imagery survey. Please if you can spare a few minutes we would appreciate if you could take this & pass it along to others who might be interested. Thanks! tstbl.co/763-452
#neuroscience #visionscience #psychology #aphantasia #mentalimagery

#Introduction with a billion #hashtags...

I'm Alba, a #trans #nonbinay #bisexual #autistic #vegan #antifascist #activist from #Nijmegen, #NL. In addition to my #autism, I've also got #ADHD, #hyperlexia, related auditory processing and executive function issues, #aphantasia and #SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory). I'm an IT #tech at a large #international company, a volunteer for the #radical #intersectional #anticapitalist #political party #BIJ1 and a freelance #translator. I speak #Nederlands, #français, #English, #Deutsch and #Esperanto. I play #saxophone - I have a bari sax, a tenor sax and a soprano sax. I also have a #flute and a #ukelele but I don't play those nearly as well as the saxes. I love playing #TTRPG like #DnD5e and #PF2e, and I have two #cats, an orange slonk called Hobbes and a void chonk called Nita.

I used to hang out on mastodon.lol until early 2023 when that instance shut down. I then moved to todon.nl and recently decided to hop on to blahaj.zone ​​

Oh, #aphantasia is why I love our #jellyfin project so much. And the #insomnia. It's basically my digital insomnia nest.

How interoception and the insula shape mental imagery and #aphantasia https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10548-025-01101-6

I had a weird thought about my #aphantasia. I repeat-buy products based on the packaging appearace, I rarely remember brand names (which makes it annoying when companies change packaging!).

But I can never bring these pictures to mind, I just 'know it when I see it' this seems to imply that my brain is storing images and comparing them, but not displaying them, like a 'headless' server computer :)

Personal #aphantasia point: when people say “picture this” and go on to describe (badly) a complex topic, I’m increasingly wanting to jump in and say “I’ll remind you that humans aren’t telepathic and you need to describe this better.”

A fascinating video on aphantasia here. While we’ve been thinking and saying that there are people who lack mental imagery, it appears that they may in fact *have* mental imagery, but lack the conscious experience of what is happening:

https://youtu.be/avI0KtmNpo8

Props to Hakwan Lau for their neuroscience work.

Ooooh, interesting little study about #aphantasia here:

https://www.livescience.com/health/neuroscience/people-who-cant-see-with-their-minds-eye-have-different-wiring-in-the-brain

Ahah, fascinating - #aphantasia and a lack of an inner monologue can be linked (at least some of the time by the looks of it). My brain gets weirder and weirder.

https://www.livescience.com/does-everyone-have-inner-monologue.html

Turns out I am not the only writer to use the Sims as a visual aid when writing
https://archive.ph/TOoSm
#aphantasia #writer

"People who can't 'see with their mind's eye' have different wiring in the brain"

https://www.livescience.com/health/neuroscience/people-who-cant-see-with-their-minds-eye-have-different-wiring-in-the-brain

#Aphantasia #Afantasie

Völlig uninformierter Laie (me): Das relativ un-studierte Phänomen, das gewisse Menschen nicht automatisch Bilder im Kopf visualisieren wenn sie an was denken.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afantasie