What Is Aphantasia? - Deepstash
What Is Aphantasia?

What Is Aphantasia?

Curated from: aphantasia.com

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What Is Aphantasia?

Aphantasia is the inability to visualize. Otherwise known as imagine-free imagination.

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Think of a horse...

What do you “see ” in your mind?

  • You might imagine a lifelike image of a horse in your mind, while your friend might only see a dim or vague one.

People with aphantasia don’t create any images of familiar objects, people, or places in their mind’s eye, not for thoughts, memories, or pictures of the future.

We lack this visual system completely .

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It’s Not Just The Visual System

Can you hear the horse neigh? Imagine what it would feel like to travel on horseback?

Imagination is a spectrum – and not just for our visual imagery but across all our senses! 

There exist remarkable, often unsuspected invisible differences in our sensory imagination ranging from absence (aphantasia) to extremely vivid (hyperphantasia), and everything in-between.

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There Are Many Things We Know About Aphantasia…

Aphantasia can impact our ability to recollect events and facts from our past experiences (autobiographical memory ).

Evidence also points to a connection to other aspects of human experience, impacting everything from education and career choices to reduced PTSD sensitivity and even the reliability of our eye-witness testimony. 

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Fact: Aphantasics Can Be Richly Imaginative

‘Imaginative’ means having or showing creativity or inventiveness. Creativity involves a whole network of brain activities from integrating past events and identities to thinking about the future and navigating different pathways toward desired goals to invent novel things.

Aphantasics can still do all these things! We simply go about the creative process differently .

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Not Having A Mind’s Eyes Can Lead To A Different Way Of Thinking

Aphantasia is a variation in human experience. It is not a disability, disorder, or defect .

Nor is it a barrier to success. 

Discovering you have aphantasia can lead to new insights into your unique way of thinking, insights that can greatly impact your life, work, and wellbeing often in unimaginable ways.

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Aphantasia Is A Unique Variation In Human Experience

An estimated ~3-5% of the population experience aphantasia, and another 10-15% are believed to experience the opposite, hyperphantasia. 

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Aphantasics are brilliant creatives, inventors, authors, musicians, scientists, entrepreneurs & more!

Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and former president of Walt Disney Animation Studios. Craig Venter, biologist who first sequenced the Human Genome. Blake Ross, creator of Mozilla Firefox. Glen Keane, Disney Animator and Creator of The Little Mermaid. Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller.

All have aphantasia.

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...And Many More Unknown Unknowns

Aphantasia and hyperphantasia are relatively new scientific discoveries [2015], and these invisible differences in how we imagine impact our life, work, and well-being in so many different ways.

Many we’re just beginning to uncover! 

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IDEAS CURATED BY

CURATOR'S NOTE

Aphantasia is pretty interesting, especially when you have it, and I wanted to share that.

Rachel D's ideas are part of this journey:

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