@slev
Joined over 4 years agoI'm a multisensory aphantasic who worked in tech for 17 years — in Silicon Valley, Washington DC, Tokyo, and Baghdad — and have coauthored two programming books. These days I’m a nomad and exploring new interests like teaching, writing, art, and language. I write about my experiences and interests at <a href="https://slev.life/" rel="noopener">Life After Tech</a>.
That's fascinating, Christoph -- thank you! Elsewhere, a reader questioned why I put emotional memory in the same category of things like visualization. It might be helpful to share my response here: Since I’m a multisensory aphantasic too, I understand how strange it sounds to lump emotion into this. As a result, in the article, I only touched on “emotional replay” (since the article was long enough), and I didn’t go into emotional imagination more generally. To someone like me, the concept of imaginary emotion is so bizarre that it’s hard to wrap my head around it. Sure, I can conceptualize physical vs mental vision (even if I’ve never experienced the mental side of it outside of dreams), but… isn’t all emotion mental? Let me try to explain why I think emotion is similar to other modalities of thought, memory, and imagination (just like visual or motor). For people without aphantasia, memories are often experienced as reliving the event in the first person, using all the modalities of memory available to them (visual, auditory, olfactory, emotional, etc.). They re-see, re-hear, and re-experience the emotions they lived through at the time. This is quite different from remembering the emotion you felt at the time as a plot point (rather than as an emotional experience) like I do. For me, my memories may in some cases lead to new feelings similar to what I felt at the time of the event I’m remembering, but the new feelings are not replaying as part of the memory itself. So that’s “emotional replay.” Limiting phantasia to mental reproductions of physical senses doesn’t make much sense to me when you consider that there are no mental sense organs. Each of these things (sight, sound, emotion, balance, etc.) are modalities of thought and memory that may or may not be available for a given person to use. Now consider imaginary emotion in the present. Try to follow my prompts below: Imagine feeling nostalgic.Imagine feeling angry.Imagine feeling happy. More specifically, I don’t mean to conceptualize these feelings without actually experiencing the emotions in your mind. I also don’t mean to steer yourself into experiencing these emotions directly by e.g. recalling something that will make you actually feel these ways (in a way you then wouldn’t be able to just switch back out of on-demand). To me, these prompts are nearly nonsensical. But not so for people with emotional phantasia! It also wouldn’t be surprising if these two things (emotional replay and imaginary emotion, for lack of better terms) are separable. E.g., some visual phantasics can only see things from their memories; not new things they’ve never previously seen with their eyes (e.g., they can visualize a beach they've visited, but not a different beach). Phantasic capabilities don’t seem to consistently apply to the past, present, and future for everyone equally. This is all hard to make sense of for people who, like me, experience emotions as outputs only. But some people access/use emotions as modalities of thought — emotional states on their own that don’t need to be conjured. Some people even describe thinking in emotion, rather than in words or images. This is more common to hear from people who do not have an inner monologue. I’m eager to learn more about this myself, and it’s very likely my understanding and descriptions can improve. But keep in mind that different modes of thinking are just extremely non-intuitive in general since we all seem to assume by default that other people’s methods of thought work the same as our own.