Wow! I have aphantasia, and the only learning difficulties I have experienced were with memorizing large amounts of factual data, and remembering people's names. I was reading at age three, had a high IQ, and breezed through school and university. I have a strong spatial sense, very rarely get lost, and have no problems with geometry and advanced mathematics. I feel like my aphantasia made me much stronger than most others at math and science. So, if aphantasia causes significant learning problems for some people, it must have multiple flavours- and they are not all harmful.
Hi Bob, I think we aphantasics are, in a way, impoverished. My wife has an astonishingly rich trove of memories and images, not just visual but also auditory and gustatory. On the other hand, I think that we are liberated- we comprehend patterns between all sort of things, and can we do so very quickly. People who think in terms of images, whether visual or verbal, are constrained by the forms of the images. Have fun learning more about it. It gave me a new appreciation for the wide range of mental capabilities people have. - Ian
Hi Shannon, I'm amazed and fascinated by the variety of inner experiences that people are describing on the site. I'm also struck by how difficult it is to clearly represent our experiences- we are all forced to use the same words to try to describe widely varying subjective experiences. Makes me glad I'm not a psychologist! Of the postings I have read so far the one by Lê Định seems closest to my own experience. I recall and think about most stuff in terms of wordless/image-less relationships between things. The specific attributes underlying the relationships vary widely- sometimes spatial, sometimes temporal, sometimes family connections, sometimes skills, all sorts of things. I find that quite abstract relational way of thinking is very useful for solving problems, but at the same time it is a real hindrance to recalling specific data: names, faces, dates etc. My wife is the opposite, so we complement each other nicely. I don't get lost, she recalls the name of the restaurant we are looking for or the acquaintance we run into. I suspect you're right about an aphantasia-autism (or Asperger's) correlation.