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Aphantasia is the suggested name for a condition where one does not possess a functioning mind's eye and cannot voluntarily visualize imagery.

i was chatting to someone about this, and wondered if there's a crossover with liking film (a lot)

. . . i don't know too much more about aphantasia. i definitely have it (the inability to create imagery in my mind at will). it feels like a kind of blindness. like, i ask myself what my dreams look like? what do they look like?

. . . so while i can be merry in my life, it can be jarring for a friend to talk about their love for a novel, or the vividness of their dreamscapes, or the life they imagine for themselves in 10 years' time. I say 'jarring', but there can be a spectrum of emotions wrapped up in that—from guilt, or envy, to fascination and wonder—all felt in a weird instant.

there's also memories. a lot the stuff i've mentioned, it's sort of like 'can't miss what i've never had', but memories seem like a big part of the texture of a person, of how they see themselves, relate and contextualise themselves and their life. and i'm terrible at them.

i think my favourite forms of art, are those that fill that space in memory. that make me see things i can't conjure myself.
Or, at least they'll allow me to disassociate, and give me peace from the addictive now.


do you have Aphantasia?

I have the opposite but zero skill or talent to express anything in my imaginings (it's all mostly derivative of all the movies I've seen by now anyway). So it's nice to see things expressed, I guess, besides the natural escapist joy of any kind of story-telling or spectacle.

That is an interesting condition that I was unaware of. Is this an established medical condition, or a new idea for rationalizing one's way of perceiving the world?

ribcage wrote:I have the opposite but zero skill or talent to express anything in my imaginings (it's all mostly derivative of all the movies I've seen by now anyway). So it's nice to see things expressed, I guess, besides the natural escapist joy of any kind of story-telling or spectacle.

so, it's like you replay movie scenes, stills? or faces? i suppose there could be so much texture (visual data) that it's hard to re-form it/express into something of your own. with music, you can distill it down to notes, then build up from there.

but (with music) it's not so much that i hear sound, it's that i know what sound needs to come next in order to invoke a certain emotion/memory.

sorry if i'm misunderstanding. the closest thing i have is dreams.

brickwall wrote:That is an interesting condition that I was unaware of. Is this an established medical condition, or a new idea for rationalizing one's way of perceiving the world?

i just read this, and then this (which I don't fully grok at my capacity). i.e. it can be objectively tested, but few studies have been done.

here's a chattier, anecdotal article on it, after all the sciencey glarb.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-34039054

If anything I'm almost exactly the opposite: I was drawn to film (and to a lesser extent comics) due to my very overactive imagination, which excels in both visuals and narrative. So I use my mind's eye very frequently, and it's hard to imagine not having it! But amazingly not having one doesn't have to be a hindrance even in visual-oriented fields, like animation, according to this article about many Pixar staff lacking a mind's eye!

cool link! i used to do something similar to that ariel scribble. my horticulture teacher thought i was weird, but i was just searching for interesting shapes to work from.i used to do it on teledraw, too "oh that can be the close up of the dead clowns foot", and from that interesting perspective i can build in the rest of the frame.

due to my very overactive imagination, which excels in both visuals and narrative

it's just wild to me that adults have this.

paulofilmo wrote:it's just wild to me that adults have this.

Seems totally normal for me

(And no, my imagination isn't really any more mature than when I was a child lol)