A Blind Mind's Eye? I'm All Ears!
I thought phrases like “picture this” and “imagine that” were just figures of speech. I didn’t realize people actually saw images in their mind’s eye until a friend commented on a movie adaptation of her favorite book. It didn’t match the movie she saw in her head.
“You see a movie while you’re reading?” I said. “Like with pictures and stuff?”
“Yeah, don’t you?” she said.
That’s how I learned I had aphantasia, otherwise known as image-free thinking.
An estimated 1-5% of the global population experiences aphantasia, while 2-12% experience hyperphantasia, or extremely vivid visual imagination. Notable aphantasics include Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and former president of Walt Disney Animation Studios; Glen Keane, Disney animator and creator of the animated film The Little Mermaid; Penn Jillette, of the comedic magician duo Penn and Teller; and Craig Venter, the biologist who first sequenced the human genome. [1]
Even though this phenomenon was first documented by British psychologist Francis Galton in 1880, the term aphantasia was coined in 2015 by Dr. Adam Zeman, a cognitive and behavioral neurology professor at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. In 2010, Dr. Zeman reported a case of a 65-year-old patient who was unable to summon images in his mind’s eye after undergoing heart surgery. Subsequently, a number of people contacted Dr. Zeman echoing the heart patient’s account of having a “blind mind’s eye,” the notable difference being that they never had the ability to visualize in the first place. After studying this group, Dr. Zeman and his team proposed the term aphantasia being derived from phantasia, the classical Greek term for imagination.
Like Dr. Zeman’s heart patient, I, at one time, did have the ability to visualize. I only have one memory of it. As a kid, we were supposed to memorize the music for our piano recitals, but my method was more remembering than memorizing because I could see the music in my mind as though it were sitting on the piano in front of me. During one performance, I was bopping along mentally turning pages until poof. It was gone. Nothing there. Just the piano. All of sudden, I became very aware of the audience and stuttered on the last few bars of music that my fingers remembered until the pages reappeared. I haven’t seen anything in my mind’s eye since.
But it never occurred to me that I stopped seeing things in my imagination. It just wasn’t there. I thought the concept of imagination or visualization was abstract. Amorphous. I never really thought about what other people were seeing in their imaginations — that they can see a mental picture and work their way towards it. My process is more like a detective’s. Picking up clues and evidence, trying to piece together a massive jigsaw puzzle without the box.
When trying to visualize something, the literal blackness in my mind’s eye can feel like I’m falling in space. I’ve found that the best way to stop it is to take physical steps like doing research, taking photos, playing music, making videos, and writing, to help orient and ground me. In his memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, novelist Haruki Murakami says, “I’m the kind of person who has to experience something physically, actually touch something, before I have a clear sense of it no matter what it is. I’m a physical, not intellectual, type of person. I’m not the type who operates through pure theory or logic. Not the type whose energy source is intellectual speculation. Only when I’m given an actual physical burden…does my comprehension meter shoot upward and I’m finally able to grasp something.”
Like Murakami, physicality helps me process my thoughts. I mostly rearrange furniture.
As I’ve found my way to filmmaking, I’ve equated the black screen of an empty editing timeline to my blind mind’s eye. A literal and physical way to see my imagination. And as I’ve learned that my process is more conceptual and word-based, I've found it ironic that it's my interest in visual arts that reconnected me with words, music, and sound. When my mentor asked, “What is your relationship to music?” A floodgate opened. Long-forgotten memories of playing instruments came pouring out. Music had been a major part of my life for many years playing in bands, orchestras, and ensembles. How could I have forgotten that? As an adult, I had stopped playing and listening to music. When? I can’t remember why I stopped, but my mentor’s question made me realize that I had replaced music with TED Talks and podcasts.
When podcasts became a thing, I got hooked. It may seem counterintuitive, but I sometimes find the act of listening more immersive than that of watching. A disembodied voice can feel more immediate. More intimate. Like you’re being confided in. Composer, filmmaker, and cinema scholar Michel Chion suggests that “…for hearing individuals, sound is the vehicle of language, and a spoken sentence makes the ear work very quickly; by comparison, reading with the eyes is notably slower, except in specific cases of special training, as for deaf people. The eye perceives more slowly because it has more to do all at once; it must explore in space as well as follow along in time.” When listening to a particularly well-crafted podcast, my lack of visualization allows me to hyper focus and somehow the ideas go in deeper. But when there is a lack of clarity in the communication, my mind races as I try to make sense of what’s being said. I run through every possible definition of a word that I can think of. Did they mean this? Or that? Or maybe that…
These days, I rarely experience a voice alone. Almost everything has a visual component. TV, movies, videos, podcasts, social media, even phone calls are called FaceTime. And I have not yet experimented with augmented or virtual reality devices. These new technologies always seem expansive, but maybe they are limiting. With each iteration, the visual experience seems to isolate and lock the user into place. Delivery instead of engagement. Social media has even hijacked the word, “engagement.” Now it just means, “how long did you stare at my ad?”
But, once upon a time, storytelling was how we formed bonds with each other. From bedtime stories to tales told around a campfire, the oral (and aural) tradition of passing down history, legend, myth, fable, allegory, and let’s be real, probably gossip, involved people sharing physical space, warmth from a fire, and the comfort of not being alone.
In college, I used listened to the radio when I couldn’t sleep. I found a DJ who liked to played jazz. I didn’t like jazz, but I liked him. He was random, funny, and irreverent, but also sincere and earnest about his love of music. He talked about whatever he wanted. Played whatever he wanted because he assumed no one was really listening that late at night. He was no “Chris in the Morning,” but close enough.
He spoke the way I sometimes feel about trying to be understood. Like sending out transmissions or messages in a bottle, it’s just another way of feeling your way through the dark. And you’re probably just talking to yourself, so you might as well say whatever you want.
[1] aphantasia.com
