Sarah Naughton

I had been playing tennis since I was 5 years old, and when I ended up getting injured, I switched over (at age 12) to playing chess. I remember on the bus rides for chess, our coach would tell us to 'play chess in our heads'.  Like everyone with aphantasia, I had that 'Ohhh' moment when I found out that I did have the condition. And so since then, I've always tried to think of how I, well, THINK. As a successful athlete growing up until my injury, I had a tennis coach who always focused on telling me to use my muscle memory; and I find that was my saving grace.  Muscle memory is what I rely on, whether it's chess or tennis. With tennis, and I am no mathematician by any means, I was always taught to remember what the right way to hit feels like. I could never learn from watching videos, only repetition, and repetition in the correct way. I knew if my arm felt like it was off by even a bit, I knew exactly where the ball's trajectory would end up going. I learned to understand the physics of tennis, as well as what I could do to control it. It was never, "imagine this" or "picture that"; my coach only focused on what it should FEEL like.  With chess, I didn't have that luck. I remember (as I was bad at math in high school) my coach sitting me down, telling me to close my eyes and do a 3-digit subtraction problem in my head. And, I couldn't do it - to the point where I was crying. I never understood what 'mental' math was, besides it being an expression. But, I figured out my own way of doing it - muscle memory. I would make the positions of moving the chess pieces while remembering the notations and lining those two up.  I don't know if this is relevant, but it's been my experience as an athlete.  Hope it helps! 

Hey James! So I realized I had aphantasia through TikTok in 2020, and went through I'm sure the confusion and frustration that all of us have when realizing that people can actually see pictures in their minds. Now, I've always been strongly connected to the spiritual realm, having odd experiences ever since I was a kid. One of the weirdest things, though, was that many times I would have dreams that would then actually happen in real life; either in the next couple of days or in the future. I've always wondered if this was a form of manifestation, or simply having a sense of what will happen in the future. Also, whenever I get a random, bad gut feeling, usually something in either my family's or friends' lives had just occurred.  There have been moments where I have been searching for something, and, with my eyes open, for a split-second I would actually see what I would do next - like deja vu, but it would go away the minute I would blind.  I don't know if this is at all relevant to what you are questioning; but I do think that aphantasia allows for fewer distractions when we are thinking and focused on one particular instant - whether it's predicting what number a die will land on, or what a person's actions will be, our senses are more easily honed in, because we don't have the normal distractions of the outcomes.  Now, one side of my family is Puerto Rican, and I don't want to scream Santera, but I think that psychic ability lies within generations, especially one's roots. Being able to have a strong connection with the universe and the environment, as well as maintaining a constantly open mind to the fact that no one knows why we are here or how close the spirit realm truly is to the world as we know it, I find that aphantasia might actually make it easier to communicate with the other realm. I've also found that I rely more on muscle memory and the way things feel. Whether you are trying to connect a stranger to a passed loved one, or even your own family reaching out to point you in the right direction, aphantasia or not, we all can feel that influence. Hope this makes sense, and I hope more people give their input to this discussion.