Aphantasia 💭

Hi all. I'm interested to know how many of us have a serious sleep issue. So far I haven't found much of a unifying thread between aphantasics, other than that we're very familiar with what the back of our eyelids look like! But one common thing I have heard over the years is a sleep issue.

I have chronic insomnia. Interested to hear back from others.

I know I can't be alone in this; I'd love to hear from some other artists with aphantasia. Maybe we can share tips and advice about how we cope, or just commisserate with one another. I kind of feel like a bit of a fraud, you know?

I didn't even learn about aphantasia until after I started selling art. It's by no means my primary source of income, not at all unusual for an artist, but I definitely feel like I've chosen the wrong profession to get into! I also can't imagine sounds but I play several musical instruments. It's like I'm most interested in doing things I arguably have zero talent for.

The study, led by researchers from UNSW Sydney and published in eLife, found that the pupils of people with aphantasia did not respond when asked to imagine dark and light objects, while those without aphantasia did.

Link to the actual research article referenced above here.

Abstract

The pupillary light response is an important automatic physiological response which optimizes light reaching the retina. Recent work has shown that the pupil also adjusts in response to illusory brightness and a range of cognitive functions, however, it remains unclear what exactly drives these endogenous changes. Here, we show that the imagery pupillary light response correlates with objective measures of sensory imagery strength. Further, the trial-by-trial phenomenological vividness of visual imagery is tracked by the imagery pupillary light response. We also demonstrated that a group of individuals without visual imagery (aphantasia) do not show any significant evidence of an imagery pupillary light response, however they do show perceptual pupil light responses and pupil dilation with larger cognitive load. Our results provide evidence that the pupillary light response indexes the sensory strength of visual imagery. This work also provides the first physiological validation of aphantasia.

I kind of lost the habit of reading books in recent years, but would like to read a bit more. I saw this post and thought you guys might have some thoughts to share!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/99587

As someone with Aphantasia it can be a bit of a challenge to get into a book. Unlike that post about staring at paper and hallucinating, they really are just words on a page for me. Despite this, I've still managed to maintain my love of reading throughout my life, but I won't lie, it can be very difficult to choose a book over other mediums of entertainment at times. Does anyone else go through this as well? What do you do to help engross yourself in a story when there isn't a mental movie to pull you in?

This one just occurred to me, but I have always had iffy handwriting and recently have been trying to learn Russian which is reliant on fairly tricky cursive.

I have found the whole experience of learning a new style of cursive to be frustratingly difficult and was wondering if not having a good visual memory might lend itself to a slightly harder time of it.

Abstract

For most people, visual imagery is an innate feature of many of our internal experiences, and appears to play a critical role in supporting core cognitive processes. Some individuals, however, lack the ability to voluntarily generate visual imagery altogether – a condition termed “aphantasia”. Recent research suggests that aphantasia is a condition defined by the absence of visual imagery, rather than a lack of metacognitive awareness of internal visual imagery. Here we further illustrate a cognitive “fingerprint” of aphantasia, demonstrating that compared to control participants with imagery ability, aphantasic individuals report decreased imagery in other sensory domains, although not all report a complete lack of multi-sensory imagery. They also report less vivid and phenomenologically rich autobiographical memories and imagined future scenarios, suggesting a constructive role for visual imagery in representing episodic events. Interestingly, aphantasic individuals report fewer and qualitatively impoverished dreams compared to controls. However, spatial abilities appear unaffected, and aphantasic individuals do not appear to be considerably protected against all forms of trauma symptomatology in response to stressful life events. Collectively, these data suggest that imagery may be a normative representational tool for wider cognitive processes, highlighting the large inter-individual variability that characterises our internal mental representations.

HTML link.

Abstract

For people with aphantasia, visual imagery is absent or markedly impaired. Here, we investigated the relationship between aphantasia and two other neurodevelopmental conditions also linked to imagery differences: synaesthesia, and autism. In Experiment 1a and 1b, we asked whether aphantasia and synaesthesia can co-occur, an important question given that synaesthesia is linked to strong imagery. Taking grapheme-colour synaesthesia as a test case, we found that synaesthesia can be objectively diagnosed in aphantasics, suggesting visual imagery is not necessary for synaesthesia to occur. However, aphantasia influenced the type of synaesthesia experienced (favouring ‘associator’ over ‘projector’ synaesthesia - a distinction tied to the phenomenology of the synaesthetic experience). In Experiment 2, we asked whether aphantasics have traits associated with autism, an important question given that autism – like aphantasia – is linked to weak imagery. We found that aphantasics reported more autistic traits than controls, with weaknesses in imagination and social skills.

Direct PDF link here.

Direct YouTube link if the other is down.