David Carter

As taxing as it is, especially on relationships, I find it is also very freeing. I don't stress about the future. I am not constrained by a grand plan. And I am incapable of being hurt by others because I forget the feeling of being hurt. I have no enemies. It's a strange kind of prison--one with a ledge leading to a bottomless pit. I often wonder if it's worth taking that leap of faith but I just keep soldiering on hoping life will get better and it's just my brain that cannot see it yet.

I have experienced hypophantasia in the exact manner you describe for as long as I can remember. Fortunately, my condition I believe is characterized by my upbringing and may still be plastic. My father was a traveling English teacher in the 80s and 90s and for my earliest years of childhood, I moved to a new country nearly every year and never had consistency in my surroundings but was challenged by a variety of languages in my prime language aquistition years. I believe this has from a very early age, set an insurmountable bias toward verbal thinking and a parallel atrophying of my visual simulation pathways. I kind of just accepted this because my method of thinking has worked very well for me until I realized that my aphantasia was co-morbid with severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM). I have always been very terrible at recalling experieces but conversely at setting goals or even just imagining a future for myself. I always hated the question "where do you see yourself in 5 years?" What really hit me hard though was when one of my best friends was recalling a shared experience and I could just see the light in his eyes as he told this fantastic story and I was oblivious to the fact that I was part it. I was engaged though, I could feel the emotions in the moment channeling through him but then he asked "do you remember that," and when I said "no" without giving it a second thought, I saw the smile and light in his eyes dissipate in an instant. That made me really self aware and I discovered in essence, all of my sensory retrieval but also emotional retrieval pathways were malfunctional (except sound for some reason). It is so difficult, bordering impossible, to reconstruct not just imagery--but experiences. I cannot relieve emotion or senses. I merely remember facts and events via semantic encoding and without emotional tags, those engrams inevitably fade. It certainly explains why I only think in terms of the present and experience emotions so strongly in the moment. It is my only opportunity to do so and without it, I feel empty. Luckily, synapses are plastic and I had a breakthrough this summer when I took the perfect combination of classes to help me elucidate my condition. To preface, these were two hyperaccelerated courses (15 weeks condensed in 5). I took medical histology (study of tissues) which included both understanding the physiology and structure (i.e., I needed to be able to identify them by looking at a cross-section). I had never taken a class like this before and I knew that with my mind's eye, I would need to try extra hard to succeed and I figured with lots of practice, I could use semantic tags to identify tissues using clues from the physiology but also the sample specifics (like magnification, stain type, etc). I took super detailed notes and used concept maps to understand the physiology and then I would spend hours studying samples and trying to replicate them by sketch but covering an entire textbook on the human body in 5 weeks simply did not allow enough time. My strategy was great for learning but not learning quickly, though something interesting that occured was compensation--my shadow figures became more refined and most significantly, I could sustain these figures in my mind for more than a few fleeting seconds. My other class was a neuroscience class and as I was experiencing this in real time, I was learning about the brain structures that process and encode information. The structures that process different types of information are also the location where those memories (aka engrams) are encoded by the hippocampus. This is confirmed by fMRI of brain when recalling a memory. Let's say you are recalling an experience of walking in the woods. You see the trees which gets processed in your primary visual cortex (at the back of the head where you hit yours). You also hear insects chirping (processed in primary auditory cortex). The feeling of the breeze on your skin or the rocks under your feets are processed in the primary somato-sensory cortex. In the moment, this is a feed-forward, bottom-up processing that moves from your sensory receptors to your CNS. Recreating that experience with your imagination however, does not involve sensory receptors at all. Rather, it is a continuous feedback loop occuring between the brain structures where those sensory and emotional data are stores and the structures that process (i.e., experience) them. fMRI is basically MRI that targets a specific product and in the case of brain scans, they are looking for oxygen because the regions that are activated in memory recall are going to be expending energy. That creates a literal trace or visualized network of neurons that are involved in this experience. Enough nerd talk. How does this relate to shadow visualization and could the strategies I have been doing since learning all this help you when you hypothesize damage to be the cause of your hypophantasia? Well, I haven't been able to get access to an MRI machine to confirm anything but my hypothesis is that my shadow figures resulted from atrophy in the pathways that sustain visual simulation (the rest of my SDAM I am unsure and the fact that so many sensory recall pathways are cut off makes me wonder if it is a trauma response I have repressed) but as for visual recall, I have been able to improve it beyond what I was able to achieve during my summer semester. Simply excercising it (which may be hard to do conciously. I was only able to do it after my default processing mode was failing) can increase the number of synapses through a process called long-term potentiation. Basically, the more often a neural pathway is excercised, the more that signals to the cells in those pathways to form more dendritic connections and receptors for neurotransmitters. Conversely, less excercised pathways experience long term-depression, or the atrophying of dendritic connections and that is how memories are forgotten and habits broken and overridden. This is the basis of synaptic plasticity. Will it work if you have experience neural damage? Yes. It may not recover fully because neural tissue does not regenerate, but other neurons can remodel to form new synapses which can take on the role that has lost function. This is how stroke patients can recover. Let's say someone suffers a stroke to Broca's area, the region of the brain responsible for speech articulation. People have been known to fully recover and fMRI shows activity not in Broca's area where damage occured but either adjacent tissue or tissue on the corresponding region of the opposite hemisphere. In fact, the bilateral symmetry of the brain provides great potential for recovering because their structures are synonymous. The only reason your brain lateralizes processes to a single hemisphere is for efficiency (such as to kill redundancy--wasting energy planning speech on both hemispheres, and also to prevent conflict between hemispheres, e.g., a stutter can be a result of competing activity in both hemispheres). Some strategies I have personally used: Ever since histology, I have taken a huge interest in drawing. You could try looking at reference images and practice drawing fully from memory. You could also utilize semantic tagging (such as the tree is about x units to the left of the rock) to support the process. It isn't bad to use the competing strategy. In fact, it can actually strengthen both. Neurons that fire together wire together and if you can create a close association between your existing information processing strategy, it can help develop the other. You didn't express anything about SDAM but if you related to any of that, I have also been trying to journal regularly. I find it helps provide semantic tags by dating and listing things that occured but also I am hoping that writing down how I felt when certain things happened will strengthen the pathway for emotional recall in the long term. I hope this helps and it was really interesting hearing your story!