Are You Mind-Blind?
What it’s like reading and writing without mental pictures
Close your eyes and imagine this:
A golden retriever with a red ball in its mouth runs through a field of tall grass. The sun is high in the sky, and fluffy white clouds bob across the blue like ice in a cup. Your smiling mom crests the hill and waves to you.
If you’re able to imagine that with relative clarity, you have the normal human ability to picture things with your ‘mind’s-eye.’ Some of you may imagine it in vivid detail. For others, it may be sketchier but still relatively coherent. If you drew what you saw, someone else could interpret your image. Around 88% of people fall into the second from the left category below.
But I, alas, am utterly incapable of visualising even a simple apple. In its place, I have a verbal and sensory assemblage of information, like an interconnected web.
This neurological condition — now called aphantasia — wasn’t named until Adam Zeman coined the term in 2015. Some websites I came across call it a ‘disorder,’ but I think it's more apt to consider it yet another example of human…
