What Everyone Should Know About Aphantasia

Aphantasia is the lack of a mind's eye. Most people don't know what it is, and that's why I want to write about it here, for artists to read.

A mind's eye is how you picture things in your head. It can include things you've seen before, or things you can piece together to imagine. Aphantasia is the spectrum between not being able to picture anything, to the point of being able to picture things in vivid detail. So people with it aren't all the same, and that's where describing it is a little hard.

I have this, and I'd describe the way I picture things as very blurry or maybe like a ghost of an image. It's kinda there, but kinda not at the same time. When I think about things, my mind prefers using memories of things I've seen versus constructing it itself. When I picture things myself, it takes a lot of concentrating and I can't quite fill all the spaces. Imaging the living room of my parents' house that I lived in for 19 years, I still can't quite remember everything on the walls or in the room. I might even remember it wrong because my long term memory of it will be so much stronger than the time I flew there for a week and things had changed.

The inability to picture things hasn't really impacted me negatively. With my artwork, it's definitely made me experiment more. It's hard to imagine how well a brush stroke will look. If I don't quite like it, I've learned how to pivot. I think about how to fix it or at least cover it up, which has also improved my problem solving skills. It's hard to say what my art would look like if I didn't have this, and was able to picture things exactly as I wanted. I think I would do more landscape paintings, and maybe illustration wouldn't be so hard. My art over the years has drifted a lot into the abstract. I never exactly wanted to be an abstract artist, but it feels so much easier than to sketch and sketch and sketch until something turns out just right. This is what I do at the moment, but I do have a lot of passion in pottery. It feels especially easy for me because each step of the pottery process can give you different, wonderful results without any precise planning. I love that, and I wonder how many artists create in a way that is guided by this phenomenon of a clear or undefined mind's eye.

Story Time

One of the most obvious moments that would define me as having aphantasia is the time I took an illustration class in college. I was in the entry level course and our professor asked us to draw a scene from a bird's eye view (overhead). I thought this was so weird, and too hard for an entry level assignment. I just thought, 'how am I supposed to do that?' For me, this and any other kind of perspective work is basically impossible. No matter how much time I spend on it, it's just not going to look right. So what I did was get up on my bed, held my phone as close to the ceiling as possible, and drew the photo I took. My professor wasn't happy I did this, but for me, it was the only way I could do it. I think it looked lazy, but if I didn't do it that way, I think it would have looked lazier, and I wouldn't have done so well. What I should have done is say 'hey, how are we supposed to do this? It's impossible.' I'm too shy to do that though. If I did, maybe it would have started a conversation, and maybe we would have realized something.

The Other Side

I don't exactly know what it's like to not have this, but talking to my mom, I see she doesn't. My whole childhood and until recently, she bothered me that I don't read enough books. She loves books, and couldn't understand why someone wouldn't want to read. I finally have an answer, and it blew her mind.

I've heard people without this are able to create 3d objects in their mind and can look at them at any kind of angle, or vividly picture a space they've only visited a few times. My mom confirms this, and this is why she loves reading. She can actually picture all the people and scenes described, and be amongst them like a movie. I think that's incredible, and also very unfair.

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If you don't believe me, here's a TED Talk of someone else with it. You can also find a few other videos on Youtube like this artist that has it.