How does it affect your ability to enjoy books? Or type of books you’d enjoy?
Do you tend to prefer more visual medium like video(movies, tv), or comic books?
A great deal, I’d
imagine.I can conceptualize.I have Total Aphantasia, and zero sense memory at all. I do have an “inner monologue” of sorts. I can’t “hear” it in my head, but I understand all the same. I don’t know how to explain with words and I don’t know how I work either, really. My outer and inner voice are the same thing to me and I have full control over it., often transitioning back and forth when I’m alone. As in, no racing thoughts. One of the ideas behind meditation where you try to silence your mind? I don’t have to try. It’s not something that takes effort for me. I bring this up because this is how I’m reading books, with that silent inner voice. One of my friends is like me with Total Aphantasia, but he has no inner monologue either. Which is bonkers to me. I don’t get it, neither does he! Haha. Many different kinds of human minds out there, it’s not so simple.
Hard to miss what I’ve never experienced, I still enjoy thinking about these fictional worlds even if I can’t conjure up a representation of what is written in my mind.
I read every genre. It’s actually specific writing styles I lean towards. If the author is really detailed with describing environment constantly, I appreciate that. I can’t really “fill in the blanks” so to speak. I also really like it heavy on the internal monologue side of things with main characters. I think that’s why I liked Ender’s Game so much when I was a kid.
I do prefer any visual media. I save all my book and research reading for when I’m at work these days, which is a lot of time actually. One of them hurry up and wait jobs. Books are far better when it comes to potentially constant interruptions.
I remember this poster in a library with a well, and the surface is an empty field of grass, and that part of the poster said “movies”. The bottom of the well was like a hideout, with all sorts of whimsical detail, which said “books”.
Needless to say, I did not get it.
Completely. Books are only good to me if the author has a nice writing style. Those character descriptions or scene description paragraphs? I just skip them. They don’t do anything for me.
On the other hand, I LOVE movies.
I do “see” inner images but they’re blurry, flashing and I can’t directly control them. So when I read I mostly focus on the text and faintly in the background there’s a “school fight recorded by hyperactive kid” version of the plot going on.
Mildly aphantastic.
Love reading, don’t know or have any different experience to compare it to.
I don’t visualise, but feel words and concepts as worda/concepts. I like descriptions as I can build up a concept with the words.
This. I also have it to a certain degree. Perfect description of how I read books. Never bothered me. Never even realized some people have a vivid visual imagination until it became a recurring reddit topic a few years ago.
999 was the realisation it was a thing for me, and then found a diagnostic questionnaire online and got the “mild aphantastia” result.
Similar experience here. Aphantastic and prefer books to shows/movies.
I hate descriptions, and I have a really hard time when there’s more than a paragraph focusing on descriptions of what things look like.
Other than that it’s fine, though I sometimes have to trace back because I often skip parts that look description-y and some authors like to slip in some piece of crucial information.
This is me too. I will read descriptions, but don’t pay as much attention. Sometimes, if after the description, there is a que that a description had something important in it, I will have to go back over a description to check what I missed.
Does it not bother you that you don’t catch what things look like as you read? If you’re skipping description, of say, a lake, do you just… Assume it looks like a lake you’ve seen in the past? What if the description plays heavy into the plot, like the water is, idk, yellow and boiling. That doesn’t matter to you?
I mean, it does bother me, but there’s nothing I can do about it.
I don’t assume it looks like anything, I simply know there’s a lake, I have no idea (nor do I care much) what it looks like. I can’t imagine what a lake I’ve seen in the past looks like.
If the water is yellow and boiling, I’ll remember it because I know water in a lake usually isn’t yellow and boiling, I just don’t have any visual aide for that.
It’s kinda hard to explain, if you show me a picture with a yellow lake, I know it’s wrong because I’ve seen lakes, but if you ask me to describe one, it’s gonna be really hard for me and you won’t get many details.
If it turns out any of the visual things was important, I’ll simply read it again and mechanically remember the details, but mechanical memory is kinda limited in what it can hold, so I avoid that unless I find out that it’s worth remembering.
I scan over the descriptions to check for irregularities or significant identifiers. So your yellow lake would be noteworthy to me or if a person is described with long hair. I don’t mentally imagine a long hair person, but I try to remember it, so if later somebody sees a long haired person in the distance I know which character is referenced.
And yes if I don’t recognise anything noteworthy, I don’t make a mental note, it’s just a normal lake, nothing important to remember.
But that isn’t always working out for me. In Neverwhere the Marquis de Carabas is described as being pitch black. Which I fully didn’t get and so was wondering why all the fan art made him so black that you can’t recognise features. Because that was how he was described and I missed that important fact.
I don’t actively hate descriptions, but I used to just skim them. Now I sometimes slow down for descriptions if I think they might bring additional meaning or context. But then sometimes when it gets to be too much work, I’ll go back to just skipping over them again lol
I sometimes have to trace back because I often skip parts that look description-y and some authors like to slip in some piece of crucial informatio
Ugh, me too! I kinda hate when that happens
I don’t have aphantasia but I still skip over descriptions. It just doesn’t really add anything for me. Much more interested in dialogue and actions
I’ve always been a huge reader, and a fast one. Í wonder if visualizing what you read slows people down.
I also have trouble recognizing faces (mild/moderate prosopagnosia), and it’s easier to recognize a name in a book than a face in a movie.
Í wonder if visualizing what you read slows people down.
Not really, I can read very fast too and also visualize it at the same time, like full blown movie. I think it’s more indicative of information processing abilities in general: I can generally keep up watching lectures at 3x speed and notice things on screen almost instantly too.
I’m super efficient at filtering information too: I’ll look at a paragraph in some documentation and immediately see “If you’re in X special case, then…” at the 5th sentence in the middle of the paragraph when skimming through documentation. Or of course skipping details I don’t care about.
I have exactly this problem. It’s also very difficult when watching a movie adaptation of a book I’ve read, to associate the character from the book with the actor in the movie. When I read, they’re just a name.
Same.
I wonder if visualizing what you read slows people down.
Yes, especially when the author probably got their inspiration during an LSD trip.
For those of us who don’t know what it means: “is the inability to voluntarily visualize mental images”
Basically if someone said “think of a nice round juicy red apple” people with the condition wouldn’t be able to imagine it in their mind.
I hadn’t followed this when apparently it became a topic of interest on Reddit.
Apparently people sit on a spectrum, where they can envision less color and detail, where people with aphantasia cannot envision anything.
Also, interestingly-enough, this is apparently not tied to the ability to envision things in dreams.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/g69hc0/dreams_in_color/
I dream very vividly, in full colour, but am a total aphant.
That’s fascinating. I can envision things voluntarily, if perhaps not as vividly as in real life—it’s not on par with looking at a fully-detailed scene, but I can certainly do color. On the other hand, my dreams have always been on the border with being unable to visualize at all. Maybe there’s a hint of color, but everything is normally desaturated, and things are transient and vague.
Huh.
Yep, can confirm, can’t imagine anything, but my dreams work well. They’re usually not very clear, but a few times I had trouble distinguishing dreams from real life.
I’m in my 40s and learned about this just a few years ago. Never affected my reading of different genres. I guess I didn’t know any different! It did help me understand why I don’t have the great memories of childhood things like my close-in-age sister does. I have always relied on her for details.
I know what the condition is but the condition is still fascinating to me.
I have aphantasia but love reading, even really descriptive passages. I don’t ‘see’ but I “feel” words, I think, if that makes any sense. Like, if I read a description of a steaming mug of coffee, I’ll feel the rising steam on my face, feel how it smells, feel the heaviness of the mug in my hand, etc. It’s a lot more vivid in a way than when I watch tv since that’s all visual and auditory.
May be the wrong thread for this, but isn’t it really common for people to not even know that have aphantasia?
I’m imagining the whole community from The Giver, where people didn’t know that they
This book's so old I don't know if it's worth spoiler-warning for
Couldn’t see colors
and they didn’t even realize.
It wasn’t officially discovered until 2005. A doctor(Adam Zeman) had a patient who lost their visual imagination and wrote a paper about it. It turns out that aphants are overrepresented in the medical and engineering communities, so a bunch of doctors wrote back, having just realized that a lack of visualization is not normal. Then, he finally published a paper on it in 2015.
Yep, I always thought “imagining” something was really just an euphemism for thinking about it.
That’s a great reference.
I actually prefer books and really can’t enjoy tv. It’s simply not my medium. I don’t think aphantasia has any influence on these tbh. It’s not like I can compare but I don’t see how not visualizing what is happening in a book should have any influence on the enjoyment. The information still gets parsed in your head just fine.
It probably depends on the person. I know for me, reading books is only entertaining if I can visualize what is happening like scenes from a movie. Sometimes I even “cast” real-world actors in this imagined movie because it makes it easier for me to keep characters consistent.
Reading just for information retention, on the other hand, sometimes takes me a few passes because I will end up zoning out if it’s not something I can visualize.
I didn’t realize I had it until well into adulthood and I’ve always enjoyed reading. Even the extensive description still has meaning I just don’t see it.
“I can’t read books that are realistic fiction. I can’t do anything that’s got like crazy world building because I can’t perceive it and I have a hard time.” -my sister
I don’t have it personally, but we both have tism and so here’s a talk we had while driving.
me: *takes wrong turn*
sister: “when I need to know my left and rights and cant do the hand thing, I remember ‘never eat soggy waffles’ because I can remember East is Right and Left is West.”
me: “wh… what?? why? why can’t you just do the right and left in your head?”
sister: “girl how”
me: “I just imagine it?”
sister: “MUST BE NICE, HUH?!”
if someone wants I can ask her in more detail later, she’s busy with something rn
Funny thing I recently discovered, aphantasia has many traits in common with autism, which is kinda fascinating.
For the longest time I thought I have some weird form of autism because way too many things fit the description, but some of the crucial details didn’t fit me.
Then I discovered that research and suddenly I knew why.
Dated a girl for a while that had corresponding R & L tattooed on the topside base of her thumbs.
That way when she was driving and people said go left, go right, she wouldn’t have to ask which way that was.
When I was with her I’d have to say things like the turn is on your side, take a my side.
It was different.
my grandma once said if I get one of those tattoos I would never get a job and live in a cardboard box because nobody would hire someone who can’t know their rights and lefts 🥀
She also said I’m infected by the devil because I love my gay dad
she also hasn’t even gone to church in 4 years because the pastor told her to not be racist.
Your grandma had a lot to say.
Those three points are a lot to unpack.
Well she was the first time I’d encountered that personally. While it was different and directions-wise I had to train myself how to convey meaning, you’ll be pleased to know I never gave her shit for it.
I taught children’s martial arts for a long time, and the best way to teach the younger ones is to face them and do the thing on the opposite side. I had to, for many years say stuff like: “step out with your RIGHT foot” while simultaneously stepping with my left,
Let me tell you, the number of wrong turns I take when someone is giving directions is so embarrassing. I have to really concentrate and like… feel which hand is my right hand.
That’s so funny. You conditioned yourself haha but it makes complete sense why it happened
Not total aphantasia, but mostly. I’d describe it as almost cartoonish, but more in the sense of the non-visual concept I associate with the image being described as being heavily exaggerated, more than any visual intensity. I get maybe brief glimpses of visualization before it dissolves into concept.
I know what the scene described looks like, and I know the associated elements well enough to be familiar with their properties and possible relevance to the story. As far as descriptions serve the telling of the story, I don’t really think I’m missing out on much.
For visual media I tend to prefer animation and comic books, though I think that’s unrelated to aphantasia, I’m probably a tad autistic. I appreciate every frame being intentional, and always get caught in a loop of uncertainty with live action; was that expression intentional or is the actor just hammy?
Yknow somehow I had a great time reading. Written word is the most reliable way to stabilize visuals in my mind, which is why I’ve taken to writing as a creative outlet as well.
Its been so long since I’ve genuinely read anything but I think thats the closest I ever got to actually visualizing something. Described well enough and my mind can really conjure up an image for once.
Its why I tend to like slow and detailed scenes. I can spend a lot of time writing a scene that only lasts eight minutes
