Discovering Aphantasia
Don’t reach for the atlas, we aren’t talking about a remote Tibetan village here. No point searching Spotify either, this isn’t a reference to an unknown singer songwriter either.
No, what we I am referring to is the absence of mental imagery.
I hold all the projector slides and have all the information, but can’t see the actual picture. NAYANTARA DUTTA, Time Magazine
Aphantasia: A life without mental images. BBC News August 2015
Aphantasia: Why I cannot picture my children in my mind. BBC News March 2024
I only discovered that was a thing a couple of years ago when I heard it mentioned on, of all things, a photography podcast (at about the 10 minute mark). Until then I had no idea that I didn’t experience things the same way as the majority of people, but it possibly explains why certain techniques, where you are asked to “Imagine you are in a field”, for example, have never worked for me. And why I am so bad at recognising faces (apologies to anyone I blank at an event).
For the record Aphantasia is not a disorder, I’m not even sure I’d call it a condition, it’s a phenomenon that, apparently, as many as 1 in 50 people may experience. And not everyone’s experience is the same. Like a lot of things, there are degrees. Oh, and there is a corresponding phenomenon called Hyperphantasia (see the reference above), which as I suspect you can guess, means having an extremely vivid imagination or photographic memory.
What the connection between being aphantasic and being a photographer is, I have no idea. One possible thought is that because we don’t have visual memories, we use photographs as a substitute, which make sense. Except that I have very few photographs from before I moved to using digital cameras, and even then, the first 14 years of that time are patchy, with the exception of what I put up on Flickr. So who knows.
All of this is to say, if you ever ask me to “Picture an apple” don’t be surprised if I give you a blank look or describe the Apple logo.