Blind in the mind – what it’s like to read with Aphantasia.

“I describe it thus: think about walking through your house in the middle of the night when all the lights are out. You roughly know where everything is, because you are very familiar with the space, even if you can’t see it. This is my mind and memories — darkness, but awareness of the space I am or was in.”
― Alan Kendle, Aphantasia: Experiences, Perceptions, and Insights

Aphantasia is the inability to form mental pictures in your mind. But what exactly does this mean?

Well, have you ever been asked to ‘picture your happy place’ or told to count sheep jumping over a fence in your head to send you to sleep? Or perhaps you’re sitting in a rather tedious lecture, and you begin to daydream and your mind drifts away…

People with Aphantasia struggle to do this, some find it impossible because they can’t create mental images in their head. Not of people’s faces, not of objects or animals or even places they might visit every day. Coming from someone who has a strong tendency to daydream and a very vivid imagination, this seemed a very strange and alien concept. I began to wonder – how do people with Aphantasia experience reading? Are they just doomed never to enjoy a book because they wouldn’t be able to picture what they read? To never be able to say the phrase that so many literature nerds take such pride in saying, ‘the book was better’??

The term ‘aphantasia’ was only coined in 2015, meaning there is a certain lack of in-depth knowledge and research surrounding the subject. But it must be noted that mental imagination falls on a spectrum, while some (with aphantasia) may fail to conjure any image in their mind at all while reading books, others may be able to – with concentration and effort – create a hazy image in their mind, and for others this may be so vivid that it seems almost real (hyperphantasia) where reading can be a really immersive and exciting experience.

A distinction must be made between ‘knowing’ and ‘remembering’, aphantasics cannot remember things in the way that plants a thought or memory in your mind, rather for them it is more like knowledge. Knowing something has happened, knowing information rather than a memory. The same applies to reading, as they read, they take in information in a way that’s more similar to gaining knowledge and facts, than of a story playing out in their mind. 

Those with aphantasia can absolutely enjoy reading, their experience of it and the way reading works in their mind is just different. Many people with the condition prefer to read non-fiction works, and have also stated that books are easier to read when there is less flowery-descriptive language and more of a solid plotline and action involved to be invested in.

Photo by Jaredd Craig on Unsplash