@billwill
Joined over 2 years agoI am a retired IT professional, I have been using computers since 1962, yes 60 years. I have been a Chief Programmer and Programming manager with 100 staff at a University Computer Centre, back in the days when computers cost millions and were rare. I do not recall when or if I ever used Visual imagery, but I dream with full colour visuals.
I've noted that a number of people on this site refer to people with aphantasis as aphantasics. I would like to see that name abolished, because it has an inherent bias towards considering aphantasia to be a disorder. Think of the words maniAC, insomniAC, hypocondriAC, dipsomanAC, aphasiAC, pyromaniAC In my opion a better word for descibing a person with aphantasia is an APHANTASIAN. Words ending in "an" or "ian" are, in my opinion neutral, w.r.t disorders, for example: Indian, Historian, Magician, American, Disiplinarian, European. I beg that anyone creatind discussions here or commenting on them to please use the word "aphantasian". Hopefully this will begin to overcome the bias initiated by Prof Zeman that biases discussion to imply that aphantasia is a disorder. Sure, he & his colleagues now exclaim that it is not a disorder, but the bias is built-in to almost everything they say about aphantasia by the very words they use. For example "Congenital Aphantasia"; can someone tell me how they managed to ask a 1 day old baby whether or not s/he could visualise??? The term "congenital Aphantasia" has no basis for it. I personally believe that aphantasia is something we LEARN as a child, in order to clarify our thinking processes.
There's no way to determine if someone was 'born with aphantasia'. How do you ask a 1 month old baby if s/he sees images? This is a mistake put forward by researchers such as Zeman, who coined the derogative phrase "Congenital Aphantasia". Since he first observed Aphantasia in a brain-damaged patient, he and his team have always had a bias towards considering aphantasia as a DISABILITY, when in practice it is an ABILITY and aids clear-thinking.
When I see a question in an Aphantasic questionnaire it makes me laugh internally because the poor Phantasics probably have to visually see a real horse or video) before they can draw it. What comes to my mind when I an asked such a question is not an image of a particular horse, in fact I don't see any images at all, but what I get is a sort of database of related instantly-recallable facts such as: a horse is an animal, an equine animal, it has 4 legs and a tail, it was used as a 'power source' in earlier time, but nowadays is mostly used for sport or recreation, etc etc, some particular horses, especially race horses had names, which might be remembered etc etc. From the data I could improvise a generic picture of a horse, but it would no be a specific horse. So asking me that question would be a waste of time and would no doubt be misinterpreted by a Phantasic researcher. Other responders in here have described the creation of a drawing, bit by bit, function by function; that's exactly what I would do, even in drawing something simple like a house.
I believe that professionals in the field of cognitive science or psychology have got it wrong, they seem to believe that aphantasia is an INABILITY to visualise, but people with aphantasia visualise freely when dreaming, hence aphantasia must be a learned ABILITY to suppress irrelevant visualisation probably to enhance logical thinking. This is backed up by the fact that many engineers and other clear-minded persons use aphantasia. The professionals in the field of cognitive science or psychology like Zeman, 'discovered' aphantasia by investigating a person who had had trauma to the head. The patient had LOST his prior ability to create internal visualizations, so all early research on aphantasia is based on an assumption that it is a DISABILITY to not use images in thinking, wheras if they had started by investigating fit free-thinking persons they would have realised that aphantasia is a learned ABILITY to avoid visualizations when thinking. Since it seems likely that the ability to suppress internal visualization is learned at about an age of 7 years, there is no way to determine that an individual person NEVER had the capability to produce internal visual images.