I have aphantasia. I am aphantastic. I didn’t know this until a few years ago, because I had no idea that the condition even existed. It is, it turns out the inability to visualise, the lack of a mind’s eye. A simple self test went viral on social media in 2020, asking the user to think of an apple, and describe what they ‘saw’ in their mind on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being as realistic as looking at a real apple, and 5 being unable to visualise the apple at all.

I was surprised to find that, not only was I a five, but that the vast majority of people are not. I had always had an inkling that my mind didn’t work quite the same way as most people, but had never dwelt on it. I used to describe myself as not having a very visual memory, but I don’t think I fully understood quite how true that was. I remember one particular occasion, arranging to meet someone in a pub in Manchester. I knew it was on a certain, very long, road. I knew I had walked past it countless times, but I couldn’t picture exactly where it was, so had to wander aimless down the road until I found it (this was the days before Google Maps). Odd, I thought, but I put it to the back of my mind.

Once I became aware of my aphantasia, it explained this, and it seemed to explain much else too. When I was a kid, I could draw pretty well if I was just copying from a picture, but if I tried to draw something from my imagination, I struggled, and pretty soon gave up. I love reading, but it became obvious my experience of reading was different from others. When I read, I’m not picturing the events or the characters of the book in my mind. Because of this, I tend to prefer sections of dialogue, or that describe what the character is thinking, more than long descriptive packages or action sequences. Perhaps this is why Ducks, Newburyport is one of my favourite novels. A thousand pages, almost entirely made up of one character’s thoughts. I get stressed before I drive, even if it’s somewhere I’ve driven before, because I can’t picture the turns I will need to take, the junctions I will need to navigate.

Of course, the tendency when given a diagnosis, even a self diagnosis, is to think that it suddenly explains everything. In reality, there are other, equally plausible explanations for everything I have mentioned above. My lack of ability to draw could just be the lack of ability to draw, accentuated by the low self confidence I had as a child. My stress about driving is just as likely to be due to the fact that I only learned late in life and still don’t do it that often. I’m not that fussed about action sequences in movies and TV shows as well as books, so maybe it’s not a problem of visualisation.

Being able to put a name on it does help though. It helps to know I’m not alone, and it helps to have a framework to think about the way I think. Anything that helps us understand ourselves better is surely a good thing. Aphantasia may not explain everything, but it does explain some things. There are even some benefits. I may not be able to visualise things that I want to, but I also don’t have to visualise things I don’t want to. Where bad things have happened to me in my life, I can still remember them, but I can’t replay them happening to me, which lessens the impact. I can still worry about terrible things happening to my children, but I can’t vividly imagine them, unlike my wife for whom this is quite a curse.

In as much as aphantasia has an impact on my life at all, it is a mild one. And when I say I am five on the aphantasia scale, perhaps it is more like four and a half. I can sometimes hold a picture in my mind for just a fraction of a second before it drifts away like a balloon from the hand of a distraught child. I wish though, that I could hold on to some pictures for longer.

One of my fondest memories is the look in my wife’s eyes after we had kissed for the first time. I wish, very much, that I could retain this image in my mind, to savour one of the happiest moments in my life. I wish I could picture the children at all the different stages of their lives. There are photographs of course, so many photographs, but I don’t want the photographs to become the memories. There are far worse things of course, and they say you can’t miss what you never had, but aphantasia feels like a loss just the same.