Where is my mind('s eye)?

On the inability to visualize or form visual memories

Lucy McGrath, Paper Marbling

The other day when I went outside to read, the chilly air caught me off guard. The end of summer, I thought, and went back inside for more layers. Disheveling my pile of hoodies for the first time in months, I couldn’t find the one I had in mind. Instead, I grabbed a baggy long-sleeve shirt. I had been avoiding wearing it until I had the chance to mend a large rip.

Except when I put it on, it was already mended. I looked at the stitches in disbelief. Zig zags of bright blue thread; a really great choice against the muted colors of the shirt. Not unlike a choice I would have made myself. I could just barely touch the memory in the recesses of my mind: I had evidently sat at my sewing machine at some point (a few months? a few weeks?) earlier to sew the rip.

If I go back far enough, I always knew my memory was bad in some ways and good in other ways. I really “got” math, I enjoyed calculus and physics. I devoured organic chemistry (structural, knowable), but struggled with basic biology (too many nonsensical words to memorize). History was difficult (facts, sequences), literature came naturally (concepts, symbols). I avoid trivia at all costs.

Like all self-discovery, this one started on Twitter. It was 2020 (February, not March) and a viral tweet caught my eye; it said “Close your eyes and imagine an apple. What do you see?” There was an accompanying image of five different options from a full-color three-dimensional hyper-realistic apple on one end to pitch black on the other end, and several variations along that spectrum in the middle.

Now, I have done my fair share of teenage philosophizing (“is the blue that I see, the same blue that you see? can we realllllly be sure?”), but I was not prepared to learn that most people have the ability to actually see things when they close their eyes. 

When I close my eyes, I see black. It’s always been black. Black as in nothingness, not as in darkness. Every time I’ve been in a yoga class or meditation when the instructor says, “imagine you’re on a beach, walking along the water, the sun is kissing your skin and the waves reach for your feet.” I won’t lie, it does sound poetic, and I can feel myself melting into relaxation. But I thought we were all pretending to see it in our heads. I’m thinking about the concept of a beach, not literally seeing a beach.

Scientists call this phenomenon aphantasia, or a blind mind’s eye. There is very little research, and the name itself was only proposed by researchers just a few years ago. Those of us who have it don’t know we have it until we learn that other people can, in fact, see things when they close their eyes.

In the three years since The Tweet That Changed My Life, small things started to make sense. I was a voracious reader as a kid, but I never understood why people got upset when their favorite book was made into a movie. I never felt disappointed in the casting because I had never imagined the characters looking like anything at all.

The other day I was sitting outside at a bar with my friend as we noticed a guy walking his dog across the street. She said, “I matched with him on Hinge last week.” They had not met yet and she could already recognize him from afar. I don’t think I have ever successfully translated a photo of someone to the real live version of them. I have a hilariously small amount of celebrity sightings under my belt (Neil deGrasse Tyson, once, on the train) despite living in New York City for a decade.

Not only can I not visualize, voluntarily or involuntarily, I also don’t have any visual memories. The concept of a “flashback” seemed to me a clever trick in films to show the internal experience of a character. I didn’t think people could literally see visual flashes of the past.

Instead, my brain stores my memories as feelings and concepts. I rarely remember what I was wearing (let alone anyone else) in my memories; I can’t tell you the color of the rug or the art hanging on the walls unless there was a particular, intentional, and long moment of noticing. But I can vividly recall how I felt, the tenor of the day, the conversation that resonated with me just the right way.

I think it makes me deeply present in my daily life, in my conversations, in my friendships. I want to savor the experience as it’s happening, because I won’t be able to conjure it at a later time.

Everything feels new, always. Friends joke about how they love “introducing” me to music or movies because I can be introduced to the same thing multiple times and experience it anew. There’s been at least a dozen instances of watching a movie I “haven’t seen before” and an hour into it I inevitably say, “oh wait, I have seen this.” My most recent partner banned me from watching trailers before we watched a movie, because if a week or two had passed I might confuse having watched the trailer for having watched the movie. I don’t mind spoilers.

It turns out only about 1% to 4% of the population experience aphantasia, although I suspect it is more of a spectrum than a binary. My entire life I’ve compensated for the lack of visualization through a journaling habit that I’ve maintained for over twenty years. I write as a way of processing and arriving at clarity, but I mostly write as a form of memory keeping.

Despite occasional frustration with my limitations, for the most part I like it in my mind. The cognitive scientist at the forefront of research of this phenomenon is adamant that aphantasia is not a disorder. “It’s an intriguing variation in human experience.”