Arthur Bass

Dennis, (Replying to your post to me) It's extraordinary how aphantasia manifests itself in very different forms. You have superior spatial reasoning/recognition; I have horrible spatial reasoning ability. Example: In my 30's (a very long time ago, alas) I  tried to build  child-size wooden furniture and toys for my little ones. What could be simpler than building a rectangular table with four equally spaced legs at the corners? Well, it turned out that when I'd somehow successfully attached the first leg and turned the table 180 degrees to add a second (opposite) leg, I couldn't visualize at all how it should look. I had to continually turn the table back and forth to 'see' what I needed to do next...... pathetic. Even something so overtly simple as affixing a parking sticker to the inside of my SUV's rear window,  to be readily readable  from the outside, becomes for me a real chore: Do I attach the sticker right side up? right side down?  I usually have to lift and close the rear (trunk) door a few times, while holding the sticker against the inside surface of the window glass, until I  convince myself that's the proper orientation. It's amazing that I can put on a pair of pants correctly .......  

I'm 81 and have been aphantasic from childhood, When awake I am 100% mind's-eye-blind. I cannot recall almost anything about my wife's face (only married 56 years and counting!), or of my children or my grandchildren. But when asleep I dream in extraordinary detail --  colors, textures, tiny details, full color and 3-dimensionality. I see in photographic detail the faces of imaginary people I have just conjured up . I sometimes see faces of people I haven't actually encountered for the last three or four decades.  I often 'see', in absolutely lifelike detail, but completely imagined, frightening  hiking mountain trails in Alp-like terrain. (I've done a fair bit of hiking in such surroundings, but I have never seen in my dreams any actual trail that I  hiked -- just these dream-synthesized ones, which always end at a stretch  of trail that seems impossibly dangerous to traverse , and which causes me to awaken. I have noticed that when emerging out of a dream into consciousness, the dream begins to fade out, both  in detail and color (sort of like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland). I am fully aware that I'm becoming awake, yet am still holding on, for a few more moments, to these fully-imagined venues and faces. Maybe it's only coincidental (though I suspect not), but I am also very seriously 'directionally challenged'. I can get lost in my own suburban neighborhood , especially at night, where I have no visual landmarks to help steer me. And if I'm in a car traveling southbound,  I  cannot navigate with a (conventionally north-oriented) map  unless I turn it  physically upside down. BTW, my 5-year younger brother is exactly as aphantasic as myself and also as directionally challenged. I find all this both wryly amusing and often frustrating. I have  BS  (Columbia) and MS (Yale) degrees in Physics, as well as a PhD from MIT in Meteorology/Computational Fluid Dynamics , yet I cannot  comfortably visualize, from a topographic map, a mountain valley saddle or col.; and never able to draw a 3-dimensional representation of two weather fronts occluding. And (I have to laugh at the thought) , I am absolutely hopeless at sketching  the commonest of animals. My little grandkids giggle out loud at what I claim is my sketch of a horse, or a cow, or even a cat. Basically I draw something quadruped-like and then 'accessorize' it with, say, an elephant trunk, or a long bushy tail, or antlers.  And this,certainly  is aphantasiacal. Anyway, thought I'd share this with the ANetwork. You may quote me directly o all this; create a self-mocking comedy sketch;  sell the movie rights --- whatever you wish to use this for.  Dr. Arthur Bass 12 Still Street, Brookline MA, 02446 -7044,  USA [email protected]