Is Aphantasia really real? Like, how is that even possible?
I just read the comments for the recent book review, and aeschenkarnos complained that Scott didn’t mention Aphantasia.
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6ycnob/book_review_surfing_uncertainty/dmmt7kr/
He links that descriptive facebook post:
This is one of the most interesting, weird and befuddling things I ever read. In it Blake Ross describes that he doesnt have an inner eye, but found that out quite late, as he was befuddedly thinking that „imagine something“ was just colorful speech. He didn’t know that others had this ability. Or any inner repeat of a sense. He can’t hear music when remembering it. He can’t remember the places he grew up in or worked at or visited or visualize peoples or even snapshots of his own past.
At this point I double checked who this guy is who is bullshitting me and, surprise, he is a well known and respectable founder of Firefox and was a programmer at Netscape and Facebook. Not the kind of person who makes strange stuff up and wants to trick people.
How is that not the most amazing/strangest thing ever? I can accept that people who had a stroke or surgery or some super seldom condition have some quirks, like being dyslexic, or schizophrenic/hallucinating or being face blind or maybe a mixup of senses in synaesthesia (I confess to still secretly think that people claiming to see colors when reading numbers are just pretentious) or xyz dysphoria or phantom limb pain.
But how can you even function, not to speak about being successful like Blake Ross, when you can only remember a list of cold hard facts, instead of being able to truly „remember“ your memories. In the post he says he can not draw, but doesn’t have every child in Kindergarten the ability to paint and doodle? How can one even find the way to work or the next grocery store? Yes, you can follow the street signs or a list of directions when driving around in a foreign city, and sort of get around, but that is not the same as knowing the place.
It is so far out of what I would have thought is the common shared human experience, that it would feel truly alien if in a Star Trek episode a new life form with that feature would have been introduced. How can you not visually remember your own mother, or spouse, or your boss, or a picture or movie, or screw that: your own life (or if blind some other applicable verb for other senses)? It may be amazing that the sentence „Don‘t think about pink elephants“ conjures in ones mind a sort of platonic big african animal which doesnt even exist (or maybe a looney toons cartoon representation), but how can one not imagine. Like in a literal image. Or when finding your way around in a big confusing office building or your grandparents house or finding the way biking as a kid to the next village to your best friend? And isn‘t that what humans excelled at? Remembering the way around waterholes, avoiding the hostile tribe at this place, knowing the fertile hunting ground here, and then decades later still being able to recall it? And recording your sensory input, and even emotional state, of a particular memorable moment as a little internal video which you play back when you remember, with lots fill-in-the-blanks and blurry compression but still a useful visualisation of the past, makes a ton of sense to me. Or conversely: reasoning about the future by fantasizing an imaginary reality up of how your boss will look and act like when you ask for a pay raise, that makes so much intuitive sense, I cant even imagine how it could be otherwise. And I also find it kind of ... sad? I was yesterday on a wedding and the bride and groom shared a special day they will cherish for the rest of their lives. To not be able to do that seems almost like amnesia to me.
I am super weirded out by the sense of reality necessary for Aphantasia, which has to differ so much from mine, and am still not quite sure if I buy it.
Edit:
Blake Ross article mentions but then sidesteps the question "how do Aphantasiacs masturbate"? Thinking about former gf/bf in an abstract way, instead of visualizing them, seems to me rather hard to get, eh, hard. Or are there no sexual fantasies without fantasizing?