How does it affect your ability to enjoy books? Or type of books you’d enjoy?
Do you tend to prefer more visual medium like video(movies, tv), or comic books?
Quoting my partner that has it: “Comic books are cool for that. I love books. I tend to gloss over heavy descriptions of place settings, I don’t spend a lot of time trying to picture it so I prefer books with dialogue. Watching a show before reading the books does help though. (Like we did with The Expanse.)”
They also mentioned that Red Rising action scenes are ridiculously descriptive and they typically skim those sections to find out who hits whom.
Completely. Books are only good to me if the author has a nice writing style. Those character descriptions or scene description paragraphs? I just skip them. They don’t do anything for me.
On the other hand, I LOVE movies.
I didn’t realize I had it until well into adulthood and I’ve always enjoyed reading. Even the extensive description still has meaning I just don’t see it.
Kinda echoing other comments in here, to say that lengthy segments where the author is describing the appearance of something can be rather annoying to me. I can’t see it. No matter how many flowery words you use, I can’t see it. I know what it is that you’re describing, I already got a good-enough understanding with the first few sentences. But I can’t see it. Please, please just move on to the actual story.
I really wanted to get into Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. I made it to the point in the first book where two characters spend an extended amount of time in a pitch black tunnel. Oh. My. Fucking. God. I can only take so many pages of “Boy it sure is dark in here” before I lose my patience. I’ve started that book at least 5 times, and could never manage to make it past that section because it’s just so infuriating to read. It’s almost like the book is mocking me, as if to say “Hah hah, get a load of this goober, can’t even see the darkness!”
I don’t blame authors for this, though. It’s not their responsibility to cater their art to my neurodivergence. It’s just a minor frustration I’ve learned to live with. But it’s also part of the reason why I don’t read much for leisure. I think this is why I’m generally more tolerant of films that aren’t as good as the books they’re adapted from, because the alternative is that I’ll likely otherwise never experience the story at all, so I’ll take what I can get.
I recommend sticking to it, the first book is generally boring, but some of the latter ones are pretty great (until they get very weird again).
Not total aphantasia, but mostly. I’d describe it as almost cartoonish, but more in the sense of the non-visual concept I associate with the image being described as being heavily exaggerated, more than any visual intensity. I get maybe brief glimpses of visualization before it dissolves into concept.
I know what the scene described looks like, and I know the associated elements well enough to be familiar with their properties and possible relevance to the story. As far as descriptions serve the telling of the story, I don’t really think I’m missing out on much.
For visual media I tend to prefer animation and comic books, though I think that’s unrelated to aphantasia, I’m probably a tad autistic. I appreciate every frame being intentional, and always get caught in a loop of uncertainty with live action; was that expression intentional or is the actor just hammy?
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For those of us who don’t know what it means: “is the inability to voluntarily visualize mental images”
Basically if someone said “think of a nice round juicy red apple” people with the condition wouldn’t be able to imagine it in their mind.
I know what the condition is but the condition is still fascinating to me.
I’m in my 40s and learned about this just a few years ago. Never affected my reading of different genres. I guess I didn’t know any different! It did help me understand why I don’t have the great memories of childhood things like my close-in-age sister does. I have always relied on her for details.
I hadn’t followed this when apparently it became a topic of interest on Reddit.
Apparently people sit on a spectrum, where they can envision less color and detail, where people with aphantasia cannot envision anything.
Also, interestingly-enough, this is apparently not tied to the ability to envision things in dreams.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/g69hc0/dreams_in_color/
I dream very vividly, in full colour, but am a total aphant.
That’s fascinating. I can envision things voluntarily, if perhaps not as vividly as in real life—it’s not on par with looking at a fully-detailed scene, but I can certainly do color. On the other hand, my dreams have always been on the border with being unable to visualize at all. Maybe there’s a hint of color, but everything is normally desaturated, and things are transient and vague.
Huh.
Yep, can confirm, can’t imagine anything, but my dreams work well. They’re usually not very clear, but a few times I had trouble distinguishing dreams from real life.
Not sure that I can really compare it to how I would be without aphantasia since, of course, it is all I have ever known, but I do stll enjoy reading. Like other people are saying, I don’t tend to concern myself with visual descriptions
This carries over to my TTRPG gameplay. I rarely ever actually describe what anyone looks like beyond the absolutely vaguest of descriptions (i.e. a heavily-built man, getting on years), which I didn’t notice until a player pointed it out to me. I mostly go by mannerisms, which I suppose is an aspect of appearance
I am still quite good at building mental maps of locations and can do all the classic “rotate a shape” kind of stuff. I can’t visualise it, but I can figure it out. I guess I’m mentally storing it in another format. Possibly related to that, one of the few types of illustration I do particularly enjoy getting in a book is a map
My dad has aphantasia and he describes something similar, but it doesn’t make sense to me when he says it either. When i ask how he knows how to get somewhere he says he “thinks in vectors”. But i don’t understand how that’s different than visualizing
To me it seems like the difference between having a written description of something vs an image of it. I can describe to you a square, 10 centimetres on each side, drawn with black ink in the centre of a sheet of white A4 printer paper. I could also show you a photo of that square. In both cases the information is conveyed, but only one of them involved an image
When I’m navigating I basically always do it by landmarks and turns, which is probably not unusual. I can use relationships of “this street goes west until it meets that street” without having to picture a map. The shape and length of that street don’t really matter for the sake of getting somewhere, only what it connects to
I hate descriptions, and I have a really hard time when there’s more than a paragraph focusing on descriptions of what things look like.
Other than that it’s fine, though I sometimes have to trace back because I often skip parts that look description-y and some authors like to slip in some piece of crucial information.
This is me too. I will read descriptions, but don’t pay as much attention. Sometimes, if after the description, there is a que that a description had something important in it, I will have to go back over a description to check what I missed.
Does it not bother you that you don’t catch what things look like as you read? If you’re skipping description, of say, a lake, do you just… Assume it looks like a lake you’ve seen in the past? What if the description plays heavy into the plot, like the water is, idk, yellow and boiling. That doesn’t matter to you?
I mean, it does bother me, but there’s nothing I can do about it.
I don’t assume it looks like anything, I simply know there’s a lake, I have no idea (nor do I care much) what it looks like. I can’t imagine what a lake I’ve seen in the past looks like.
If the water is yellow and boiling, I’ll remember it because I know water in a lake usually isn’t yellow and boiling, I just don’t have any visual aide for that.
It’s kinda hard to explain, if you show me a picture with a yellow lake, I know it’s wrong because I’ve seen lakes, but if you ask me to describe one, it’s gonna be really hard for me and you won’t get many details.
If it turns out any of the visual things was important, I’ll simply read it again and mechanically remember the details, but mechanical memory is kinda limited in what it can hold, so I avoid that unless I find out that it’s worth remembering.
I don’t actively hate descriptions, but I used to just skim them. Now I sometimes slow down for descriptions if I think they might bring additional meaning or context. But then sometimes when it gets to be too much work, I’ll go back to just skipping over them again lol
I don’t have aphantasia but I still skip over descriptions. It just doesn’t really add anything for me. Much more interested in dialogue and actions
I’ve always been a huge reader, and a fast one. Í wonder if visualizing what you read slows people down.
I also have trouble recognizing faces (mild/moderate prosopagnosia), and it’s easier to recognize a name in a book than a face in a movie.
Í wonder if visualizing what you read slows people down.
Not really, I can read very fast too and also visualize it at the same time, like full blown movie. I think it’s more indicative of information processing abilities in general: I can generally keep up watching lectures at 3x speed and notice things on screen almost instantly too.
I’m super efficient at filtering information too: I’ll look at a paragraph in some documentation and immediately see “If you’re in X special case, then…” at the 5th sentence in the middle of the paragraph when skimming through documentation. Or of course skipping details I don’t care about.
I have exactly this problem. It’s also very difficult when watching a movie adaptation of a book I’ve read, to associate the character from the book with the actor in the movie. When I read, they’re just a name.
Same.
Yknow somehow I had a great time reading. Written word is the most reliable way to stabilize visuals in my mind, which is why I’ve taken to writing as a creative outlet as well.
Its been so long since I’ve genuinely read anything but I think thats the closest I ever got to actually visualizing something. Described well enough and my mind can really conjure up an image for once.
Its why I tend to like slow and detailed scenes. I can spend a lot of time writing a scene that only lasts eight minutes
May be the wrong thread for this, but isn’t it really common for people to not even know that have aphantasia?
I’m imagining the whole community from The Giver, where people didn’t know that they
This book's so old I don't know if it's worth spoiler-warning for
Couldn’t see colors
and they didn’t even realize.
It wasn’t officially discovered until 2005. A doctor(Adam Zeman) had a patient who lost their visual imagination and wrote a paper about it. It turns out that aphants are overrepresented in the medical and engineering communities, so a bunch of doctors wrote back, having just realized that a lack of visualization is not normal. Then, he finally published a paper on it in 2015.
Yep, I always thought “imagining” something was really just an euphemism for thinking about it.
That’s a great reference.
I have aphantasia but love reading, even really descriptive passages. I don’t ‘see’ but I “feel” words, I think, if that makes any sense. Like, if I read a description of a steaming mug of coffee, I’ll feel the rising steam on my face, feel how it smells, feel the heaviness of the mug in my hand, etc. It’s a lot more vivid in a way than when I watch tv since that’s all visual and auditory.
I don’t have aphantasia and I don’t particularly fancy any medium over the other, but what I often miss is sound. Music is a whole different language to either visual or conceptual as conveyed by words, whereas imagery to me feels the most direct and laziest, music can convey feelings there are neither words nor imagery for, and so often I like adaptations of written works for injecting some fitting music, and will listen to fitting music as I read books.
When you say you miss sound, you mean while reading? I wonder if there are books that get deep with sound description. I can think of a couple that might, but they of course do not have actual sound.
Yes, while reading. I miss music to be specific, so this applies to comic books, manga etc.
A good soundtrack to me is everything in terms of tone and atmosphere and mood.
Less subjectively, it makes sense, since you can’t touch or smell the world inside a book or a game or a film or whatever, the remaining types of information are auditory and visual, so 50% of the information about a thing is aural, so games, movies, shows etc. get that as a leg up on books etc.
On the other hand a lack of music does often force my brain to make some up which gets my lazy ass to go nurture that hobby and produce some sounds so I’m not complaining!
Have you heard of Diane Ackerman? She has a book, A Natural History of the Senses, that gets deep into human connection to these things.
I really enjoy reading, but I can’t picture a scene, or what characters look like. It can be a bit confusing at times, but doesn’t usually take away from the enjoyment.
As an example, my favourite sci fi author Randolph Lalonde (great independent author, buy his books 👍) had a scene in a recent book where some characters had a shootout in a warehouse that held several spaceships. The ships were all at least a few metres long, so the warehouse was huge. In my head, everything was centred on a small area around the characters, and I could sort of picture them being within a few feet of each other.
I couldn’t picture any details, it was as if he had written that ‘the man stood near the woman, and pointed the gun towards the crates’, even though the scene was well written with good descriptions. My brain couldn’t translate the description into a layout in my head.
I still really enjoyed the scene, but every now and then it was as if my brain realised that things should be further apart, or one character should be taller than another, for example.
