Oliver Johnston

One point I think a lot about, which Greg touches on above, is how children are taught at school from the perspective of people who can visualise internally, and likely have no knowledge that there are children in class who aren't able to do that i.e athantasia . When I was at school, a lot of the memory techniques that were attempted to be taught to help children remember were based on visualizing objects to associate with certain facts etc, especially for exam revision purposes or imagining english story writing, and so obviously for me this technique falls flat on its face, and not only doesn't work, is actually quite frustrating when you don't know why it doesn't work and keep trying given everyone else seems to be finding it easy. . So perhaps my takeaway here is that teachers should be more aware of this, and specifically perhaps you could talk to your child's teachers as they progress through the various phases of education, to let them know about this and raise awareness more generally. . In the ideal world perhaps children could be asked a simple visualisation test task when they start school to detect potential aphants so they can be taught slightly different memory recall techniques.

Hi thanks for posting an interesting experience! Can you elaborate more on what you mean when you say "My recall/imagination, while vivid and colourful, is not under my conscious control."? . Do you mean you do see some images but simply you cannot control what you see? Or do you mean in the sense of the details you can recall, like a text based summary of the memory, but with no visual representation available?

As the first commenter said, no you're definitely not alone in this, although as alluded to there is what seems to be a spectrum of aphantasia, we assume everyone has the lack of visual minds eye, because that is how it is usually realised, but also includes the other imaginations that people have, smell, sounds, taste. I personally lack all of these too, and I know it came as quite a shock to me to realise that this was something other people were experiencing as part of their normal day to day life! . I'm quite sure there are probably a decent percentage of the global population out there who have no idea that the way they experience is any different from anyone else, why would you after all? The only thing that made me suspect  was people talking about visualizing things to help remember, and at the time thinking this is surely metaphorical. But it wasn't till around 2015 when I saw an article on BBC detailing some research it really twigged. . Personally I think though that it's important not to focus on it as a weakness, as you say you did well academically and it allows you to move on with things quickly, but I do have a kind of jealous that others are having a potentially richer tapastry to experiences, although whether that's always positive or not is of course open to debate!

This is an interesting topic, there is another similar which I've commented on before that's worth reading too [(https://aphantasia.com/question/has-any-research-been-made-in-this-matter)]

Thanks Zach for the comment, that's v interesting that your experiences going forward  latched onto the types of visuals that you had with DMT. I suppose it makes sense, in that like most reactions to stimuli your body learns how to interpret those signals and then repeats them on the next occasion. . As I say for me it was incremental, for a long period, maybe a year or more, it was simply fractal noise without any structure, which gradually got a little more organised. And that was with very regular trips, at least monthly, sometimes weekly..And ramping up the dosage, 9g+ with mushrooms was not uncommon, which gave very intense experiences, including generating sounds\buzzing\body vibration as well as closed eye visuals. However, and I think it was all of a sudden, it started to form coherent images and scenery which were very life-like. Hence it was as if with practice your brain learns how to 'see' and interpret the stimuli, rather than just the random patterns. But similarly to you, once I reached that level, I never went backwards to the past levels of visuals, it was always scenery going forward. . I imagine a similar pattern to how people learn to control advanced prosthetic limbs using their brain signals, or even riding a bike, at first it's very random, the brain fires off all manner of signals, but with practice the brain learns how to focus, and you never regress back. . Anyway I think it's a very interesting subject, and I'm v glad there are other people out there who are having similar breakthroughs, to see for the first time what internal visualization can look like, whatever their version of it looks like, but just seeing 'something' is quite the miracle after a lifetime in the dark :)

I found out about the term Aphantasia in 2015 from the BBC News article on the subject, and that was quite a mind boggling thing, given I'd not appreciated that people were actually able to internally visislise memories or abstract thought, and always assumed people were talking metaphorically.  . However like Zach mentions above, I too have robustly experimented with psilocybin mushrooms & DMT, so I can provide some input on my experiences.  . I have no internal visualisation ability normally, although I do dream with visual imagery, and occasionally as I'm drifting off to sleep, I do see some fleeting images; so I gather my internal imaging circuits do work, just appear not to be engaged in normal wakeful states. . My psychedelic experiences stretch back over 20 years or more, however I became much more interested in their potential after learning what I did in 2015, and how they could let me experience what others take for granted.  . To summarize there does seem to be a threshold you have to cross to be able to experience any images with closed eyes (CEV's) on mushrooms.  . The usual guide dosages (3-4g) do not have any CEV results for me. I would experience moving patterns with open eyes at this dose, but still internally black. However once this is doubled to 6g plus, then CEV occurs strongly for around 20-30 minutes, and increases in intensity as the dosage increases. For normal non-aphants this would seem like a high doseage, but I suspect for aphants this is the threshold dose.  . Non aphants seem to report much longer lasting effects, but for me this always seems limited around the half hour mark. So I assume there must be a much higher threshold required to unlock the internal images.  . As Zach also mentions, the lack of structure in these visualisations..Fractals, patterns etc. Certainly that was my experience at first, as if my brain did not know how to put an image together, and so it was all abstract..  . However with time, and many repeated journeys, this has developed into very coherent imagery every time. City scapes, tropical islands, intricate flyovers, people, animals etc..so I feel this is simply my brain having to learn to use the stimuli effectively. I've read similar stories for blind people who have had imaging sensors implanted into their brains to give rudimentary sight, at first it is all abstract, but gradually the brain learns to put it together.   . DMT has had similarly very effective results, but lasts for only a few fleeting minutes before returning to black.  . Legality issues aside, I am extremely thankful for having been able to experience what I have seen internally with these journeys; to see how the other half live every day without a second thought, for which otherwise I would almost certainly never have been able to.