James_Miller mentioned Aphantasia and it blows my mind: “What?...imagination has been my greatest portion of thinking...and there are people who cannot imagine...” To me, weak but constant visualization & audioization come right after reading any texts, and I stop reading when my brain can’t visualize properly. I once suspected my sister(very young at that time) does not like reading books because she was not used to imagine while reading.
How do people with Aphantasia read texts and process while studying?
I don’t even know how to answer this because it’s coming from a place that’s so foreign to me. I have a quite weak visual imagination (not full-on aphantasia), and I’ve never heard a voice speaking words in my head when I read (although actually, now that I’ve listened to a lot of audiobooks, I can force this to happen briefly if I concentrate). But I’ve always enjoyed reading! To me, I guess I would say, words are just sort of fundamental? Like, the word itself, the shape of squiggles on the page, is the thing that has meaning, and I don’t have to visualize anything beyond it to understand it. It’s like the difference between reading a foreign language you’re not that good at, where you still have to translate every thought into your native language to really understand it, versus reading in your native language, where there’s no translation step.
It might be true, as quoted in Mo’s comment below, that people with weak visual imaginations are less likely to enjoy extremely visual-description-heavy fiction like Lord of the Rings – I indeed found reading the LotR books mind-numbingly boring, borderline painful. But in almost all works there’s a ton of content that can be enjoyed without imagining it into being: concepts, emotions, even most kinds of events. I also find myself very drawn to beautiful writing, wordplay, and just skillful use of language in general, and now that I think about it, this is probably why. Neat!
The same applies to nonfiction – building an understanding of the connections between concepts doesn’t have to rest on any sort of visual framework. The concepts can just become connected, literally/physically, in the structure of your brain.
I do think that I would have struggled less with university-level physics and the related math if I had more of a visual imagination. It’s quite hard to keep track of things when it all just feels like symbols you’re manipulating; I imagine that being able to visualize things would have let me viscerally understand connection between the math and the physical systems being described. As it was I just sort of, knew explicitly that they were connected. But it was all very vague and confusing.
I hope this helps you understand the experience somewhat. Feel free to ask me followup questions.
Oh, and I also notice that despite my weak visual imagination, movie adaptations can still ‘ruin’ books for me, not exactly because they lock in a certain way that things look, but because they lock in the characters’ personalities and the general vibe.
Thank you for the detailed description, I can sense how aphantasia is like much better now:)
And I realized I have a very similar experience with you, because visualization is not happening everyday in my brain. Now I feel that It just makes content memorable when it happens, and that makes me think I do visualization often. But when I read a name of someone, I am reading his or her name, not imagining the face of the person. And I still can recall a sense of the person just by reading it. I can grasp your concept of “fundamental” with this. Also In my physics class, I had more comprehension on kinematics than on atomic physics, because I could imagine an object in motion but not the ionization of an atom.
I remember reading Lord of the Rings was tedious at a young age around middle school. I had fun reading the Hobbit and Harry Potter series(by J.K.Rowling), so I suspect Tolkin put something hard-core inside LotR :p
As a native Korean, I find your language analogy working really well! Nowadays I have no problem reading and writing in English, however, I discovered myself generating more humorous and interesting results in Korean. This is similar to the gap between reading paper material and online material.
By the time movie adaptation happens, movie makers modify the book’s contents and charming points, often severely, so I don’t watch them most of the time. I appreciate how you analyze that “ruining” because I didn’t sensitively identify why I don’t like it.
In conclusion, I think our brain processes work pretty similarly regardless of aphantasia. I may consider aphantasia into the personality category rather than biology category.
When I first learned about aphantasia, I thought It described me—I don’t naturally visualize when I read. But after closer inspection, I found out that I can visualize if I put some effort into it. Images might not be terribly vivid, but recognizable enough.
So technically I don’t have aphantasia, but my experience is pretty close, and it’s all kinda confusing . For the most part of my life, I did not even realize that was not normal.
I was always fast reader because of that, you can save time and mental resources by not visualizing, so that’s an upside. As for downsides, I can’t imagine them, haha.
When I first saw this test, I choose #6 directly without really imagining a red square. And I realized it and tried again. For first some moments I saw #1-3! And could not move to #6 really when I concentrated on. Although at this time, closing my eyes, I tried to “see” the image crystal clear, and it will be a hallucination if it happens.
I am a bit confused now how to balance between aphantasia and hallucination. I know I am not aphantasia based on several moments that mental images striked my memory. I am also not seeing hallucination, it normally does not happen and I haven’t experienced it yet. But I can’t really see the exact and obvious red square except the feeling I am imagining it.
Which one do you think is your case?
I have not tried the square test before, and it’s weird. At my first attempt I just completely failed. I’ve certainly seen enough squares in my life to imagine them, but it just did not happen. Then I imagined drawing that square—not the tactile sensition of it, but just the process of going from A to B to C to A, but that only gets me the 3rd type of square. I can push it to the 4 with additional effort, but I can’t seem to get past that just yet. So it’s far from red.
The shape is certainly easier for me to imagine than color, colors tend to be really bleak.
It reminds me of another classic example, where they ask you to imagine an apple.
At my very first attempt I found that difficult for some reason, but after a while I have no trouble imagining any apples I want—green, red, yellow, mixed color, stem with leaf or without leaf, no stem, partially eaten, cut in half, partially rotten, with a worm inside it, etc etc.
But then again I have a lot more experience paying attention to apples then to abstract red squares, even if I do see squares way more often. Maybe it adds to effect. Or maybe all the possible transformations of shape distract me enough from color so that I fail to notice how poor my imagination of it really is.
Everything everybody else has said resonates with me as well, but there’s one thing nobody has really hit on yet, so I’ll talk about that.
While I have no visual imagination, I have a fairly rich auditory one. While thinking up an example, the McDonalds jingle that goes ” ba da bop ba baaaa, I’m loving it” played in my head. I can recall it at will, and pitch shift it as I want. I make no claim of having perfect pitch, but I do have decent relative pitch.
My internal voice has internally repeated nearly every sentence I have ever read or written, unless I deliberately shut it off. I can recall voices and sounds, and I think it helps me identify accents and languages. This doesn’t make me a perfect mimic, but I have yet to mistake an Aussie for a Kiwi , which apparently happens.
Movies definitely affect my reading of books, but I usually don’t mind these changes. I’m never going to read Samwise in a voice that isn’t Sean Astin’s, and that’s fine by me. My reading speed is average. And in a good book, I will often stop and reread particularly pleasing prose, which is generally (but not necessarily) alliterative. The pleasing effect can either be in hearing the sounds play out, in my head, or in the way it would feel to say the sounds. So while visual readers may enjoy a book for the color of the roses, I am often doing similarly, by admiring the susurrations of those same roses. This may be related to ASMR in some way.
I am physically nodding to you right now:)
I do hear the voice of comic book/novel characters that my brain synthesizes automatically, everytime. I noticed this when there is an audio/movie version of a book and disparity exists. Actually, audiozation comes more often. I read and write texts with an inner voice, and sound gets clear when I read slower. That’s why I stay to be a slow reader.
Although I have Aphantasia, standardized tests indicated that I have high reading comprehension. I wonder if my Aphantasia contributes to my reading very quickly. I read fast enough that when one of my students asks me to read a paper in office hours if I read at my normal speed I figure she will think I didn’t actually read her paper.
I generally have been a slow reader, so it sounds reasonable that people with aphantasia read fast. I am going to bring this topic to my friends and find out who may have aphantasia haha