After a long hiatus, I’m reviving my blog. And what a better subject than about mental states of writers?
(But please pardon the current state of the website; I need to redo it soon.)
A few days ago, in a closed writers’ community forum, someone brought up the topic of Writers and Aphantasia. If you haven’t heard that word before, here’s a brief rundown for you. Aphantasia is the condition when the person sees–or hears or experiences via any other sensory modality–no or little mental imagery. You know, the imagined pictures in your head, the internal voice and earworms, and the like. (For the sake of examples, I’ll talk more about vision but most of what I say should be applicable to any other sense, as well.)
The condition was originally discovered in the late 19th century, after which were little research on it was done until very recently. I suppose part of the reason for this lack of interest is that it’s not really a disease of any sort, since the condition doesn’t prevent people from functioning–doesn’t create any impediment for leading good and happy life. As often happens with anything to do with complex mental states, it turned out to be not a black-and-white condition but rather a spectrum. People can be anywhere. on it, from seeing no mental imagery whatsoever (again, using vision as an example) to extremely detailed, photographic pictures in their mind’s eye. Some people may see mental imagery involuntarily but remain unable to create it on demand. And so on.
Interestingly, I discovered that many writers experience aphantasia to varying degree–including, most interestingly, authors known for evocative and even cinematic imagery in their stories. The writers’ community in question consists solely of professional writers, with publication credits under their belts–and quite a few of them reported aphantasia, some of them even a complete lack of mental imagery. Although I’m not at liberty to repeat about what the community members said about themselves, I can name a famous author who is not a member of that community and who publicly admitted having aphantasia: Yoon Ha Lee. And I can talk about myself, of course.
I must be somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. I do see mental imagery, but it’s rather vague and nebulous. For example, I can picture a tiger in my mind, but if asked to count its stripes I wouldn’t be able to do that. I’d see something of a tiger’s shape and see that it has stripes–but it would be the “stripeness” of it as a whole; I would see some stripes but not go from one stripe to another and count them on the entire tiger. If asked to focus on an individual stripe, I sure can imagine one (just as I can imagine the tiger), but it would be only that one stripe. I can imagine another stripe, of course, count it, then imagine another, etc. But I can count them this way ad infinitum, because I wouldn’t know when the tiger’s stripes end–I wouldn’t see them on the tiger as a whole, unless I stepped back to see the tiger again, at which point I would lose the focus on the stripes and instead just perceive the tiger’s “stripeness” in general.
I can see quite a complex imagery in my mind, actually (as attested by my stores). And in dreams, the same. But it will not be pixel-like detailed. It will have just the minimum of detail necessary to see it as a whole–like I don’t need to know how many stripes a tiger has to see the tiger in my mind. I suppose the real world is too detailed for my own comfort to also require such detail in my mental imagery. What matters to me is the imagery as a whole, not the detail.
What the members of that writers’ community also observed is that the level of detail (or lack thereof) of their mental imagery also holds for dreams and memories. Arming ourselves with some neuroscience, we indeed can link them all–and with the evolutionary principle. But that will be the subject of my next blog post: Remembered Present and Nature of Creativity.