Ask Lemmy

A great deal, I'd ~~imagine.~~ I can conceptualize.

I have Total Aphantasia, and zero sense memory at all. I do have an "inner monologue" of sorts. I can't "hear" it in my head, but I understand all the same. I don't know how to explain with words and I don't know how I work either, really. My outer and inner voice are the same thing to me and I have full control over it., often transitioning back and forth when I'm alone. As in, no racing thoughts. One of the ideas behind meditation where you try to silence your mind? I don't have to try. It's not something that takes effort for me. I bring this up because this is how I'm reading books, with that silent inner voice. One of my friends is like me with Total Aphantasia, but he has no inner monologue either. Which is bonkers to me. I don't get it, neither does he! Haha. Many different kinds of human minds out there, it's not so simple.

Hard to miss what I've never experienced, I still enjoy thinking about these fictional worlds even if I can't conjure up a representation of what is written in my mind.

I read every genre. It's actually specific writing styles I lean towards. If the author is really detailed with describing environment constantly, I appreciate that. I can't really "fill in the blanks" so to speak. I also really like it heavy on the internal monologue side of things with main characters. I think that's why I liked Ender's Game so much when I was a kid.

I do prefer any visual media. I save all my book and research reading for when I'm at work these days, which is a lot of time actually. One of them hurry up and wait jobs. Books are far better when it comes to potentially constant interruptions.

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 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 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.

Mildly aphantastic.

Love reading, don't know or have any different experience to compare it to.

I don't visualise, but feel words and concepts as worda/concepts. I like descriptions as I can build up a concept with the words.

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.

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.

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 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 actually prefer books and really can't enjoy tv. It's simply not my medium. I don't think aphantasia has any influence on these tbh. It's not like I can compare but I don't see how not visualizing what is happening in a book should have any influence on the enjoyment. The information still gets parsed in your head just fine.

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

and they didn't even realize.

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.

Not total aphantasia, but mostly. I'd describe it as almost cartoonish, but more in the sense of the non-visual concept I associate with the image being described as being heavily exaggerated, more than any visual intensity. I get maybe brief glimpses of visualization before it dissolves into concept.

I know what the scene described looks like, and I know the associated elements well enough to be familiar with their properties and possible relevance to the story. As far as descriptions serve the telling of the story, I don't really think I'm missing out on much.

For visual media I tend to prefer animation and comic books, though I think that's unrelated to aphantasia, I'm probably a tad autistic. I appreciate every frame being intentional, and always get caught in a loop of uncertainty with live action; was that expression intentional or is the actor just hammy?

"I can't read books that are realistic fiction. I can't do anything that's got like crazy world building because I can't perceive it and I have a hard time." -my sister

I don't have it personally, but we both have tism and so here's a talk we had while driving.

me: *takes wrong turn*

sister: "when I need to know my left and rights and cant do the hand thing, I remember 'never eat soggy waffles' because I can remember East is Right and Left is West."

me: "wh.. what?? why? why can't you just do the right and left in your head?"

sister: "girl how"

me: "I just imagine it?"

sister: "MUST BE NICE,, HUH?!"

if someone wants I can ask her in more detail later, she's busy with something rn

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

You're asking the wrong question. How do you guys without aphantasia manage to read when there's pictures whizzing around your head all the time??

Mechanically, whenever I read about someone's or someplace's introduction and it describes their appearance, I'll just skip that section. If it's more than a sentence-long description I'll often unconsciously just move on to the next paragraph - it's literally meaningless to me.

I read a lot when I'm not stressed. This week, I've read the whole of the Robots series by Isaac Asimov (four books, around 1500 pages total). Several times, I've read entire books in one sitting without even moving.

I can't really tell you if it affects my ability to enjoy books, because I don't know how I'm "supposed" to enjoy a book. So instead I'll just talk about why I like to read.

1. Emotion Being able to feel something that really doesn't happen to me in my daily life. I feel much stronger emotions through reading (and films or TV as well, to a lesser extent) than I ever can about myself and the real people in my world. For example,

2. World-building This is something that I think Alastair Reynolds is really good at. He writes science fiction books that are grounded in reality, and being able to see what he imagines. Another good example is old science fiction where there's the dichotomy between humanity having conquered space thousands of years ago and yet the cutting edge of technology developed a few years ago is recieving the news on a paper ticker tape! Seeing what what the authors imagined vs things we take for granted today but was so advanced it never even occurred to them, like the Internet.

3. Mystery / plot There's a certain beauty to seeing the web that's been built up over the course of a story all coming together at the end. A good example would be Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time where all the threads come together and the resolution at the end wasn't what I expected but, in hindsight, nothing else would have done it justice.

4. Character growth Gravity Dreams by LE Modesitt is my favourite book and I don't know why. I think it's just that the journey the main character goes through really speaks to me and gets me thinking about my own philosophy and life.

In summary, I'll say that you don't have to see something to comprehend what is happening and to be touched emotionally. As for your other question, I also watch film and TV but I definitely prefer animated over live. I can get easily confused between different actors which doesn't happen with animation for me. I find that TV or film takes less effort to enjoy, but also that I don't enjoy it as much as a book.

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.

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