Look at these pictures. Can you see the cube on the left and the face on the right?
Can you imagine seeing things in your mind? Can you hear an inner voice as you think or read?
One of the authors, Lauren Breuer, can’t do either of these things: to her, the image on the left looks like a jumble of two-dimensional shapes, and on the right, all she can see is a mop.
Lauren cannot imagine sounds or visions or hear an inner voice when she reads. She has a condition we call “deep aphantasia.” New Paper At the frontiers of psychology.
“Blind Heart”
Both authors Hallucinations – We cannot have visual experiences through imagination.
Aphantasia is often described as “having a blind mind,” but often also incapable of other imaginative experiences. So someone with aphantasia may have a blind and deaf mind, or a blind and tasteless mind.
We are often asked what delusion-free state is. A few analogies may be helpful.
Humans have multilingual minds
Most people can experience an inner voice when they think, and if you only speak one language, your inner voice will “speak” that language.
However, we understand that other people can speak many different languages, so you might be able to imagine what it would be like to hear your inner voice speaking several different languages.
Similarly, we can imagine what your thoughts are like. Thoughts can be diverse and may be experienced as inner sensations of sight or sound, or as imaginary touch or smell.
Our minds are different: neither of us can imagine visual experiences, but Derek can imagine auditory sensations and Lauren can imagine tactile sensations. We both experience thoughts as different “inner languages.”
Among hallucinatory patients, Any Imaginary sensations. What would their thought experience be like? We believe we can explain.
Lauren can imagine touch, but she doesn’t have to: she has to choose to have touch, and that takes effort.
I imagine your imaginary visual experiences are similar. So what happens when Lauren thinks but doesn’t have an imaginary sense of touch?
Our subconscious
Although most people are able to prehear their speech in their mind before speaking it out loud, many do not. People can participate in a conversation without having to prehear their speech.
For Lauren, most of her thoughts are like this: she writes without any prior knowledge of what will be written, sometimes pausing because she realizes she’s not ready to add more yet, and then resuming when she feels ready.
Most of what our brains do is unconscious. For example, and I don’t recommend it, we’ve all been distracted while driving and suddenly realized we’re heading home or to the office instead of to our destination. Lauren feels that most of her thoughts are like this unconscious workings of the mind.
What about planning? Lauren can experience it as a combination of imaginary textures, physical movements, and recognizable states of mind.
Once a plan is made, there is a sense of it being completed. A planned speech is a succession of imagined mouth movements, gestures, and postures. Her artistic plans are experienced as textures; she does not experience an imagined audio or visual list of her intended actions.
There is a big difference between patients with aphantasia
In contrast to Lauren, Derek’s thoughts are expressed entirely in words; until recently, he was unaware that other ways of thinking were possible.
Some patients with phantom disorder report occasional involuntary imaginary sensations, many of which are due to past unpleasant experiences. Neither of us has ever had an imaginary visual experience, voluntary or involuntary, while awake.
This highlights the diversity: all we can do is describe our own particular experiences of aphantasia.
Humor of Frustration and Misunderstanding
People with aphantasia may become frustrated when others try to describe their experiences. One theory is that they may imagine visual experiences but be unable to describe them.
This may seem condescending, although it is understandable that you are confused: we both know what imaginary sensations are like, and so we believe we can recognize that certain kinds of imaginary experiences do not exist.
Confusion can go in either direction. We were recently discussing an experiment. The study was too long and needed to be shortened. So we were considering which imaginary visual scenarios to cut.
Lauren suggested cutting a scenario in which the audience was asked to close their eyes and imagine seeing a black cat, and we thought it might be difficult to see an imaginary black cat in the blackness of closed eyes.
The only person in the room who could imagine a visual experience began laughing. Apparently, for most people, it’s easy to imagine seeing a black cat even with their eyes closed.
Severe aphantasia
Researchers believe that aphantasia occurs when activity in the front of the brain fails to stimulate activity in the back of the brain.feedbackImagination is necessary for people to have imaginary experiences.
Lauren appears to have a previously unexplained type of aphantasia, where feedback in Lauren’s brain goes awry, causing actual visual input to feel atypical, so she can’t see the cube at the top of this article, or the face instead of the mop, or many other typical experiences of visual input.
We have coined the term “deep aphantasia” to describe people like Lauren who are not only unable to have imagined sensory experiences, but who also have atypical experiences of actual visual input.
Our purpose in describing our experience is to raise awareness that some people with aphantasia, like Lauren, may have unusual experiences with respect to real visual input. If we could identify these people and study their brains, we might be able to understand why some people can conjure up imagined sensory experiences at will while others cannot.
We also hope that raising awareness of the different experiences people have when thinking will encourage tolerance when people express different ideas.
This article is reprinted from conversation Published under a Creative Commons license. Original Article.
