I’m pretty sure I have aphantasia, but I’m not sure that I’ve always had it. Maybe my brain is weird! I’m writing this up just in case it’s interesting or helpful to someone else.

If you haven’t heard of it before, aphantasia means the inability to visualize things. If someone presents me with the classic example, “visualize an apple”, I can close my eyes and see… nothing. I can tell that my brain is attempting to project or identify an apple, but there’s no visual apple there. The thing that really tipped me off to having aphantasia was the Ball on the Table experiment. I won’t spoil it for you here, but just know that my result was 100% in line with aphantasia.

That said, I do seem to have the ability to recall visual memories. A bowl of apples that I saw this evening sitting on my living room table appears in my mind, though faded, and it feels as though my brain is exerting effort to recall the image. (I know, I know, there are no nerves in the mind. But sometimes it feels like certain parts of my brain are “straining” to work on something. The apples, for example, seem to be loading from my upper right hemisphere.)

An interesting complication that this presents is clothes shopping. On noticing an item on the sale rack, I’m unable to visualize myself wearing it – I have to actually try it on and look in the mirror. I’ve learned to rely on other heuristics for determining if an item is likely to look good on me.

I don’t seem to have aphantasia when I dream – my dreams are quite vivid, though never lucid. I don’t have exceptional recall of them, except for a handful. This seems to align with the research: a 2015 paper [pdf] reports that many folks with aphantasia do have visible dreams, or involuntary image flashes.

I sometimes get these involuntary image flashes, almost like a hallucination – that is, I can’t control the content of the image flash – by opening my eyelids just slightly and clearing my mind. It happens more when I am tired or on the verge of sleep. My eyes gently focus on nothing, and all of a sudden I get intense, photographic scenes – sometimes abstract, like grotesque faces morphing around, and other times concrete, like a scene of small sprites dancing around in a circle. The images don’t last long, and if I try to focus on them too much, they disappear or run to the edges of my vision like an eye floater. I think the image flashes are relatively new, as I’ll discuss below. They’re not unpleasant, though, and in fact are quite fun to see.

As a child, I was identified as a “visual-spatial” learner, and this lines up with various things that I can still do now. I remember songs on bass guitar by the “shape” that the notes make through time as I play them on the neck. I’m pretty good at games that require quick visual thinking (Galaxy Trucker), visual recognition (Spot it), or – perhaps unrelated – word recall (Anomia). By comparison, I’m not great at audio, somatic, or pop culture games.

That said, I don’t think I’ve always had aphantasia! And this is a new revelation to me, which came as I was discussing it with a friend and starting to actually take stock of it. I realized that I do have some memories of visual daydreams (aka fantasies, although that makes it sound more nsfw than it is), that I had when I was younger. The main one that comes to mind is from when I was probably 14 or 15 – I can recall the visuals of the situation clearly, as though they were a memory, yet I know that I was awake when I came up with this daydream.

Interestingly, I found a 2021 paper about a person who had acquired aphantasia from COVID-19. This immediately resonated with me. I seem to recall having a richer visual mind before I was sick with Covid in November of 2020. I’m hesitant to diagnose myself based on a single paper (or really, a single sentence in a Wikipedia article), but at the very least, this is very interesting to me in a way that feels like it could be correct.

That said, the fact that I have some visual memories of self-generated imagery before 2020, combined with the visual flashes that seem to be a new phenomenon, points to something weird going on. I did not lose my taste or smell during any of my (now three) bouts with Covid.

Taking a slight detour, a 2021 study found a correlation between aphantasia and anauralia, the inability to “visualize” music or audio in the mind. I find myself, perhaps with hyperauralia: I sometimes find an entire symphony or rock song playing in my head with full instrumentation, all playing at the same time. A “phonographic” memory, one might say. This happens for music I’ve heard as well as music that I’m coming up with, although usually the music that I invent is simpler and has fewer layers.

A strange thing about this that I haven’t come across before is that it seems to happen more as I get stressed or tired. Sometimes, I get exhausted (and a kind of brain fog creeps in), and I lay down to take a nap only to find a precisely-recreated song playing in my mind. As I drift off to sleep, the song will suddenly disappear, which coincides with a relaxing of my muscles and body. Perhaps I fell asleep for a moment and woke up? One time, the music turned off with an audible (to me) “POP”, which startled me. But I haven’t had that happen again, and I’m not sure I’ll ever get an explanation for it.

I’m certainly not an expert on this, and I only recently discovered /r/Aphantasia where a lot of information is being shared about this rare(?) condition. I’m quite happy to talk about this if you have questions and know me personally, or if you want to drop me an email! Brains are weird!!

(Thank you to Elena Stabile for reviewing and editing this post)