Philip Armstrong

I'm surprised that spelling and writing are something that people with aphantasia find difficult, as I would not have thought that there is a strong visualisation component involved in those activities. Maybe that is because for me, who cannot visualise anything, I developed a different way of learning to write and spell. For me I could always "hear" the words in my head and I was able to remember the alphabet by knowing how each letter was constructed, so I did not have any trouble learning to write and spell. In fact I feel that because I cannot visualise anything, I rely much more on words and descriptive phrases to remember things. On the other hand, I cannot draw anything from memory and am still limited to stick figures, so I understand that perfectly. I also feel, having lived in Japan for 10+ years, that had I been born there, where it is necessary to learn approximately 2000 kanji characters in order to read a book, I would have struggled much more. My attempts to learn kanji in adulthood, where most methods rely on visual association of the characters with particular scenes, were a complete failure. You also mention music, but again I don't see why being aphantasic should have any bearing on musical ability, since I don't believe that visualisation is really a necessary skill for learning music. After all music is all about sound, and I can "play" a song in my mind, imagining how it sounds, without requiring any visual element, but maybe I am lucky in that way and some people cannot do that. To be both without sound and without vision must be very tough indeed.

A few years ago I read something about a man who was aphantasic (I'm not sure that was the word that was used then but he was blind in his mind's eye) and he gave the following example: Tell someone to think of a nice big juicy apple and picture it in their mind. Then ask "what color is the apple?".  Almost everyone will say red, green, or possibly golden yellow. I knew at once that I could not say anything about the color of the apple because there was no visual element to the apple I was thinking about - merely an "apple concept" that had no color. The man I read about was the same as me. I have tried this on some people and they all instantly know the color of the apple they are visualizing. This is when I realized I was aphantasic. I was already in my late fifties by then and it came as a shock to me that most people can visualize things in a different way from me. Other evidence came from learning languages. There is a learning method that relies on visual imagery to remember words. For example in Italian picture a cat sitting on a gateau - the Italian for cat is "gatto". This method was zero help to me and the same was true of visual methods to remember Japanese kanji characters, or remember cards in a deck (go through your house in your mind and put particular cards in each room, etc.).