Aphantasia

I sort of figured this out freshman year in high school when the science teacher asked people to imagine an apple and then more apples, and I didn’t get one, LOL. But it still didn’t register 100%. Visual puzzles are interesting, I once tried to imagine turning the pieces to fit correctly, and while I couldn’t see a damned thing in my mind, I was able to to do pretty good. My personal description is that the images I try to imagine are there, they’re just behind a curtain of a sort. I know them, I feel them, I can put them into words... but I can’t actually see them. It’s bizarre, and like Lawrence, my writing gets praised for some of its visuals... go figure! If I mention this to people, I tend to get a stare and a version of “how the hell does that work with writing?”

Perhaps it even requires more imagination than folks who can just see stuff in their head.

Out of curiosity, what do you see when you close your eyes? I see sparkles, brilliant, beautiful spirals and swirls of sparkles, like looking into a peculiar nebula. As a kid I often fell asleep watching the light show, heh heh.

 

Conversely, a certain percentage of folks do not think in words. They do not have the running internal dialog of the majority. I can visualize to at least some degree but I've found I can remember the appearance of something better if I put it into words. It gives me a reference to hang the visuals from. (I used that for the MP in one of my mystery novels)

But I'll admit I do not visualize the scenes, characters, etc in my fiction beforehand. I build them with my words. Then I can see them.

 

There are degrees. In High School some people could visualize many apples. Fewer people could visualize two apples than one, three than two, etc. My daughter who’s rather gifted in visual art claims to see full images, and my wife claims that when her brother threatened to rip her arm off and beat her with it as a kid she could “see” him beating her with her arm... literally. There is clearly a broad spectrum here that would be near impossible to understand without being inside another person’s head. And then there is the reputed photographic memory where a person can read the page of a book they’ve read before without looking at it... I dunno! My wife, on the other hand, never remembers her dreams, while I often have lucid dreams. The brain is a wild beast.

 

Me, I can't visualize stuff. At least not very clearly.

Fiction Writers on Fiction Writing (1923) asks numerous authors if they can "see things with your eyes shut," (along with other questions) Fun read!

 

I don’t visualize scenes, I screenwrite them But in a sense I do visualize them, I just can’t see it... which is impossible to really understand becauseI don’t really get it. I can develop an image in my head, say of a creature, and it’s THERE, I can put words to it but I can’t see it. It’s weird.

 

How do you live like that? lol

I just found out about this recently and it absolutely blows my mind. Now I worry that when I write I won't have described things clearly enough because I absolutely "see things like a movie" in my head. I tend to not describe characters except for the bare minimum or settings. Even recently I chopped an old manuscript of description because I felt it was clear enough.

 

What we don't know about the human brain is fascinating, it is interesting reading about Savants and Split-Brain experiments when the Corpus Callosum had been cut:-
Split Brains