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?
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 know what the condition is but the condition is still fascinating to me.
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 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.
Kinda echoing other comments in here, to say that lengthy segments where the author is describing the appearance of something can be rather annoying to me. I can’t see it. No matter how many flowery words you use, I can’t see it. I know what it is that you’re describing, I already got a good-enough understanding with the first few sentences. But I can’t see it. Please, please just move on to the actual story.
I really wanted to get into Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. I made it to the point in the first book where two characters spend an extended amount of time in a pitch black tunnel. Oh. My. Fucking. God. I can only take so many pages of “Boy it sure is dark in here” before I lose my patience. I’ve started that book at least 5 times, and could never manage to make it past that section because it’s just so infuriating to read. It’s almost like the book is mocking me, as if to say “Hah hah, get a load of this goober, can’t even see the darkness!”
I don’t blame authors for this, though. It’s not their responsibility to cater their art to my neurodivergence. It’s just a minor frustration I’ve learned to live with. But it’s also part of the reason why I don’t read much for leisure. I think this is why I’m generally more tolerant of films that aren’t as good as the books they’re adapted from, because the alternative is that I’ll likely otherwise never experience the story at all, so I’ll take what I can get.
I recommend sticking to it, the first book is generally boring, but some of the latter ones are pretty great (until they get very weird again).
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.
This is probably the most relatable one I’ve seen so far
Another great analogy are those comically quick cuts in Bollywood dramas where they mix slo-mo, sped up shots, random super closeups, the same shot over and over and whatever else until you can barely make out what’s even going on
Both of your descriptions match closely with how I internally visualize. Never bothers me until I try hard to follow a visual description
Does your sense of direction also suck? Because it really does for me and I’ve always suspected a connection. I still get lost in my hometown from time to time despite living there for 9 years now.
My sense of direction is usually pretty good. If I’m distracted I’ll get turned around fairly easily but it’s not hard for me to figure out where I accidentally went.
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’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.
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.
Quoting my partner that has it: “Comic books are cool for that. I love books. I tend to gloss over heavy descriptions of place settings, I don’t spend a lot of time trying to picture it so I prefer books with dialogue. Watching a show before reading the books does help though. (Like we did with The Expanse.)”
They also mentioned that Red Rising action scenes are ridiculously descriptive and they typically skim those sections to find out who hits whom.
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
I really enjoy reading, but I can’t picture a scene, or what characters look like. It can be a bit confusing at times, but doesn’t usually take away from the enjoyment.
As an example, my favourite sci fi author Randolph Lalonde (great independent author, buy his books 👍) had a scene in a recent book where some characters had a shootout in a warehouse that held several spaceships. The ships were all at least a few metres long, so the warehouse was huge. In my head, everything was centred on a small area around the characters, and I could sort of picture them being within a few feet of each other.
I couldn’t picture any details, it was as if he had written that ‘the man stood near the woman, and pointed the gun towards the crates’, even though the scene was well written with good descriptions. My brain couldn’t translate the description into a layout in my head.
I still really enjoyed the scene, but every now and then it was as if my brain realised that things should be further apart, or one character should be taller than another, for example.
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.
That’s a great reference.
Yep, I always thought “imagining” something was really just an euphemism for thinking about it.
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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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
Not sure that I can really compare it to how I would be without aphantasia since, of course, it is all I have ever known, but I do stll enjoy reading. Like other people are saying, I don’t tend to concern myself with visual descriptions
This carries over to my TTRPG gameplay. I rarely ever actually describe what anyone looks like beyond the absolutely vaguest of descriptions (i.e. a heavily-built man, getting on years), which I didn’t notice until a player pointed it out to me. I mostly go by mannerisms, which I suppose is an aspect of appearance
I am still quite good at building mental maps of locations and can do all the classic “rotate a shape” kind of stuff. I can’t visualise it, but I can figure it out. I guess I’m mentally storing it in another format. Possibly related to that, one of the few types of illustration I do particularly enjoy getting in a book is a map
My dad has aphantasia and he describes something similar, but it doesn’t make sense to me when he says it either. When i ask how he knows how to get somewhere he says he “thinks in vectors”. But i don’t understand how that’s different than visualizing
To me it seems like the difference between having a written description of something vs an image of it. I can describe to you a square, 10 centimetres on each side, drawn with black ink in the centre of a sheet of white A4 printer paper. I could also show you a photo of that square. In both cases the information is conveyed, but only one of them involved an image
When I’m navigating I basically always do it by landmarks and turns, which is probably not unusual. I can use relationships of “this street goes west until it meets that street” without having to picture a map. The shape and length of that street don’t really matter for the sake of getting somewhere, only what it connects to
