Forum: Author Hangout

Just ran across this article: People Who Can't Picture Anything Are Rewriting the Science of Imagination. I'm really not sure it's the best article, but it triggered a few thoughts.

Ever since I heard of aphantasia (it's a surprisingly new thing - the first recorded mention of it is 1880, but the term, and academic study of it, comes from 2015), I've known I'm probably a aphantasic.

If you don't know the term, aphantasia is not being able to form pictures in your mind. The 'apple test' is one of the classic tests for it. The prompt is: think of a bright, red apple. Picture it in your mind.

I can't, unless you give me a picture of a bright, red apple. I know what one looks like, but I don't see it as a picture. More or less, what I have in my mind is the concept of 'apple' applied to the concept of 'red'. 'Apples' are round, have stems, and so forth. I can broaden it out to yellow apples, green apples, and so forth. None of them come with pictures.

As far as I know, I've always been this way. What we know of it suggests that most people are that way, but some people acquire it via aging, injury, etc.

All of this is almost beside the point. It's just been a curiosity for me. Nice to know, because I've always been confused when people talk about 'mental pictures' of things. I'm good with tasks that allegedly require 'mental pictures' (mental spacial manipulation, etc), but I think that's a good memory for geometric relationships.

What got me to thinking was another test, the 'ball test'. This has two parts:
1. Close your eyes and imagine a ball resting on a table
2. Picture someone walking up and pushing the ball, then watch what happens next.

I can't do that, but I immediately jump to a mental model of 'ball' sitting on 'table', 'person' walking up and pushing it, ball 'rolling'. Great, right?

Then come the questions:
What color and size is the ball?
What gender and appearance is the person?
What shape and material is the table?

Um ... I don't know that? (Cue Monty Python 'Aaaaaaaaaa' off the bridge, into the pit). To have a concept of 'ball', I didn't need color or size. Ditto 'person', when the role of that person was 'ball-pusher'. And the same for the table.

I strongly suspect this affects my writing. I don't naturally form mental pictures of anything, so details that my mind thinks are extraneous are ignored. That's not necessarily a bad thing - writers get poked every so often to 'leave room for the imagination.'

But it also means I sometimes get questions from an editor such as, 'This person has been in your story for a long time now, and I don't know how tall they are.' Well, yes. I don't either! But, most likely, I should know that. I just don't, because it never occurred to me to ask the question.

I know how tall my major characters are, because that matters and I wrote it down, and sometimes it gets referenced. But I have to go look at it.

I know there are at least one or two writers here with aphantasia. There might be more - allegedly about 4% of us are like this. But who knows?

But I'm curious about how other people perceive the world. I can't do what other people do, and I spent quite a lot of time assuming no one else could, either, and that people forming 'mental pictures' of stories or characters was either a cute metaphor or maybe 'so-and-so is X tall, Y weight, etc, and celebrity A is about that, so they probably look more-or-less like celebrity A, who I know I think is pretty/handsome/plain/ugly/etc, so that's them' - a very conceptual, thought-based approach. It certainly changes what I think other people do while reading, and most likely while writing.

I had never put a name to it, but it's an issue that I have to varying degrees. At times, I can actually imagine pictures, though usually not perfectly, at other times I can't at all, or something in between. I'm pretty sure it's a result of head trauma, as I remember being immersed in pictures of everything I read when I was young. It changed after I had a bad concussion and retrograde amnesia that took half a year from my memory. It goes hand in hand with prosopagnosia - a difficulty to remember faces (an even younger term from the mid 1940s), which in turn makes it incredibly hard to remember names if there isn't a meaningful story and emotional anchor attached to the person. It feels like the visual thing often happens in a part of my brain that's just out of reach and lacking the necessary "wires".

It also means that, depending on the story I'm writing, I sometimes get stuck when I need detailed visual descriptions. Sometimes mental exercises like autogenous training get me into a state where visualizing works enough, sometimes (less often) I get up and it just does, other times I'm stuck for days. AI has been a huge help in that regard lately. I can throw a relevant part of a story at an LLM and tell it to create an image AI prompt, then generate an image that is reaonably close to what I need to describe and that fills in some of the blanks I'm struggling with.

It seems I'm still lucky that it's not all black and white for me. Totally with you about the geometric visual models to the rescue.

I have to admit to finding it really strange, and contradictory, that people who can't picture things in their mind, can write good stories, as you so obviously can. I would have thought the main ability of a writer was the ability to picture things in their mind.

I'm not an expert but that model of the brain doesn't seem consistent with an article I read recently about a Stanford University study. My archaic computer can't access the actual study, but here is a link to another article about it.

AJ