Aphantasia and What It’s Like

Last updated on January 29, 2025

Well, in one way or another I have been putting off (or building up to?) writing this post for many years. Six or seven years ago I mentioned to a friend that I was trying to picture someone’s face and although I couldn’t see it-for I’d never been able to see faces-it felt like it was the hardest my brain had ever tried to construct an image.

I don’t even know what I thought that phrase meant. To ‘see faces’. I just…knew that some people could and that I couldn’t. But I don’t think ever thought that that was meant literally either.

My friend seemed shocked when I told him I’d never seen someone’s face before. So I looked into it. “Why can’t I picture people’s faces?” That one google search changed my life and fundamental understanding of reality. It very quickly led me to an article from 2015 written by a fellow aspiring writer. I think it being written from a writer definitely helped-I was able to relate to a lot of his perspective and experience.

In the post I learned, as this man had before writing this post, that not only could people actually picture faces, they could actually picture anything. Say, a red triangle floating in the air, as the author of this post suggested. So I turned to my buddy sitting on the couch next to me and asked him if he closed his eyes, could he see a red triangle floating in the air? He told me he didn’t even have to close his eyes, he was already looking at the red triangle!

I don’t know that I’ve ever had my mind blown more fully than in that moment and in the next couple of months. The first few days were filled with revelation after revelation. I learned it was called Aphantasia and that it was believed only 2.5-3% of the world had it. I joined a group on facebook. I started reading posts from other people. People who found out in their twenties. People who found out in their fifties. People who had always known since childhood. Those who had found out years before. And those who had just found out, similarly to how I had.

There were a lot of differences but also some similarities between us all. For those of us who didn’t figure out until late in life, a similar phrase kept popping up. “I always thought people meant those things figuratively.” My go to example of this would be that when I was younger, I can distinctively remember my mom giving me advice in regards to making a shot with a basketball. She told me to see myself making the shot before I did. The way I had always interpreted that was, ‘have the confidence to know it’s going to go in, even before it does.’ Basically, believe in yourself. Not a bad motto or mentality to have (I still managed to take something positive away from that moment) but certainly not what the words meant. I would later find out in the following years that people’s sensorial reproduction ¹ could be used to improve their athletic performance. There was once a study done on Formula One (I believe-don’t quote me) racers. Those who ‘ran’ the track in their heads first before actually driving, performed better than those who didn’t.

But back to the moments of the first three days since discovering I had Aphantasia. That quote “I thought it was meant figuratively.” Kept going on and on in my brain. I couldn’t believe it. I mean I had literally misunderstood a significant amount of the words that I had used my entire life. I grew up obsessively reading and I was trying to become a writer, I wanted to be a writer. I had always identified as a writer and my vocabulary and relationship with words was one of the few things that I had going for myself.

Then a thought clicked. If I had always assumed that these visual leaning words and phrases were figurative but it turned out that they were actually literal. Could the same be true of other words? Like, could people actually hear the songs that were stuck in their head? When they thought of their grandma’s house did the smell really ‘fill the room’? Could they actively hear their mom yelling at them in the past.

So by day three I posted a poll on the facebook group asking everyone to what extent they were lacking sensorial recall with the different appropriate choices. And the differences flooded in. There those who only lacked visual, those who lacked a few, and those like myself who lacked them all. There were plenty who hadn’t bridged the connection between their revelation for visuals to the other senses.

I became obsessed. There for a while, I would ask anyone and everyone. As hard as it is for you to currently think of my brain not having any sensorial reproduction, I can guarantee it is just as hard for me to conceptualize what your thought process is like. But there’s this weird thing that happens where, I know that this is a reality. But It’s hard to process 24/7 that it’s a reality.

It’s not just a change that I can key in and my brain goes, oh yeah. It’s something that shocks me every time I have a revelation. My friends and I would be reminiscing a funny scene from a t.v. show and I’d go, ‘hang on, can you guys picture that episode?’

There are far too many examples for me to even consider putting them all here but I will share that I struggled with it in the beginning. I don’t think I’ve been more envious of another thing someone else has had other than a tangible imagination. To me, in many ways, it felt like the missing piece that I didn’t have for most of my life. I got lost in the beginning thinking on not being able to picture my parents’ faces, not being able to relive my best moments, of not being able to visualize as I read or as I write.²

But eventually, overtime, the positives came into view. Nowadays whenever I tell someone, though it’s been years since I lost in myself in constantly asking everyone a million questions, they often respond with, ‘that sounds terrible.’ To which I tell them, it has its good and bad, like everything.

“Can you relive the worst moments of your life?” I ask.

“Well yeah…”

“I can’t.”

I don’t know that I even need to say anything else here other than that. What I will say however is less about Aphantasia itself and what unfolded after I learned. Learning about how my brain is actually structured and in fact how others’ is, changed me. I always knew that saying “everyone thinks differently.” I thought it meant that we all thought about different things, not that we used entirely different machinations to think. ³

I struggled with Theory of Mind. Big time. I’d say it’s one of the things that caused the most difficulty in my life. But when I learned that other people could visualize. And when I came to accept it as a fact. That something I could not even imagine experiencing was the experience of others, it forced my Theory of Mind out of its dried up cocoon and it has only continued to sprout since then.

It’s not important that I’m different or how I’m different. Nor is important in what ways I am similar to the majority. What’s important is my understanding of my mind and the mind of others. The better that has become, the better my life has gotten.

Thank you all,

-Y.J. Sargis

1. I personally use this phrase to refer to the different senses of ‘imagination’. Often in discussions around Aphantasia we talk about it as having no imagination. But that gets complicated, because many people with Aphantasia are very creative, which causes people to think ‘you must have an imagination, look how imaginative you are.’ But what we’re talking about here is the physical imagination. Not to mention, Aphantasia is defined by the lack of volunteer mental images. Inherently, we link images to visuals. But, technically, all sensory reproduction in the brain is referred to as images. So you’d have mental audio images, mental visual images and so on. Not to mention that some with Aphantasia only lack visual images, while some its a smorgasbord and others like myself have no Sensorial Recall whatsoever. I’d apologize for the length of this footnote, but here we are.
   
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2. I read a lot as a child. I would need a whole other blog post to even begin trying to describe what the process of reading for me is like versus what I think the process of reading is like for the average person. But one of the craziest thoughts for me was that I don’t know what my characters or worlds in my own books look like. Anyone who has ever read anything I’ve written has seen things that I have not. Although of course, everyone will see something different, they’ll still see something, which I do not. That originally caused despair. Now I think it’s cool. As a writer, I get to help create an experience for others that I am incapable of having.
   
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3. Don’t even get me started on what impulse my brain used when growing up to decide between taking things literally or not… ↩︎