The other night, very late, just before sleep, I was talking with my girlfriend and somehow mentioned that I have aphantasia. She didn’t remember what it was, so I explained it. The conversation changed when I told Bia that I cannot see my late grandmother’s face in my mind. She got sad immediately. Not in a dramatic way, just genuinely sad for me, because for her the face of someone she loves is something she can call up internally, almost as if it were still there. I can't do that. Or at least not as vividly as she describes her own mental image.
Until then I had treated aphantasia as a curious fact about myself, not as something that might change the texture of memory, absence, and love. Not as something that might have shaped my way of thinking, my personality, or even some of my skills.
Remembering without seeing
If you have never heard of aphantasia, or of the "mind's eye," try the following exercise:
- Close your eyes and imagine your front door.
- Can you actually see it in your mind?
- Can you tell what color it is? Do you see the color in your imagination?
- Can you count the windows?
- Can you open the door in your mind and see the inside of the house?
- Now ask yourself:
- Are you looking at an image of your front door?
- Or are you simply remembering facts about your front door?
Aphantasia is not a memory problem. Most people with aphantasia know what things look like. The difference is that they remember without visualizing, much like knowing the capital of France without seeing a map of France.
Beyond the mind's eye
During that conversation, I also realized that I don't have a strong mind's nose or a strong mind's ear. I can't recall or recreate a specific smell on demand. I had never really thought about that before. Can other people vividly remember a smell and almost feel it again? Can they hear someone's voice in their mind with something close to real clarity?
I really can't. But I do have a very loud mind's voice. For most of the day, there is a strong voice in my head. I talk to myself a lot, or rather, I hear my thoughts. They occupy a big part of my mental space.
Memory without replay
Not having a mind's eye may be part of why I often struggle to remember certain things unless people give me other cues, signals that help me retrieve the memory. For example, when Bia asks whether I remember a restaurant or some place we went to a while ago, I usually need extra hints. What else did we do that day? What did we eat? What happened before or after?
That is my experience of memory. Less replay, more reconstruction. I often get back to a memory through context, sequence, and association, not through a vivid sensory scene.
What research seems to suggest
Some research1 suggests that people with aphantasia rely more on semantic memory, abstract concepts, and verbal reasoning than on mental imagery, visual simulation, or sensory recollection.
That matches my personal experience. Not only in my work, but in my general way of thinking, I tend to operate through concepts, facts, and relationships between concepts. While my girlfriend can visualize how a new kitchen will look, I think more about how the workflow in that kitchen will function.
Several studies also suggest that people with aphantasia often have:
- less detailed autobiographical memories
- less vivid recollection of personal events
- reduced ability to mentally relive past experiences
I definitely relate to that. I notice it when people ask me to tell a story from my past. When I remember an event, it is often thin. Factual. Not very sensory. Sometimes it even feels emotionally flatter in the retelling than it probably was in the moment.
There is also some evidence2 that aphantasia can be associated with reduced emotional intensity in certain situations.
That makes intuitive sense to me. Mental images seem to amplify emotion. There is a lot of research showing that, in many situations, the brain and body respond to imagined scenarios in ways that partially overlap with real ones. If your mental images are vivid, they may have a stronger emotional effect than if they are faint or absent.
I haven't found any concrete research about the following, but I wonder whether the intensity or even the form of love, missing someone, or remembering someone can feel different when you cannot replay that person internally in a vivid sensory way.
What may become stronger instead
This part is more speculative, but it still feels true to my experience. I do feel that I can hold a conceptual map of a complex system, along with its dependencies and effects, more easily than some people who think more visually.
I don't mean that people with aphantasia are inherently more logical or analytical. I only mean that when one mode of inner experience is weaker, other modes may end up doing more of the work. In my case, verbal and conceptual thinking seem to carry a lot.
While looking into this, I found a small but interesting Reddit thread of aphantasic people describing their own "skills".
How different minds feel from the inside
One of the things I keep coming back to is how rarely we talk about our inner lives, about what memory, imagination, and thought actually feel like from the inside. We assume other people remember the way we remember, imagine the way we imagine, and miss people the way we miss them. Often they don't.
That, more than aphantasia itself, is what stayed with me after that conversation with Bia. What I had treated as a curious quirk may shape the texture of memory, absence, and attachment more than I realized.
The seed for this post was planted months ago, when I read My Head as a Lake and later A List of Introspective Descriptions. Both stayed with me because they try to describe something we rarely compare directly: what it feels like to have a mind from the inside. If you are curious about this kind of thing, especially the strange ways inner experience can differ from person to person, that list is worth exploring.
Maybe we would understand ourselves, and each other, a little better if we asked more often what it actually feels like to be inside someone else's mind.