I don’t see images in my mind and I feel fine about it

A New Yorker article on the “profound” consequences of aphantasia ignores the upsides

Levels of mental imagery, ranging from vivid visualization (1) to complete aphantasia (5).

I don’t know anything about music from a theoretical or analytical perspective. I know that there are “notes” and “chords” and other things like that, but I could not possibly describe a song in any technical sense to another person or even to myself.

That said, I can certainly hum a song I know to myself. And notably, I can hum it to myself, playing a little tune in my head without making any noise. The song in my head doesn’t really sound the same as listening to music — it’s faded and not as rich — but it’s a real thing. I couldn’t tell you what “Mary Had a Little Lamb” sounds like or write a sentence describing its tune, but sitting here right now I can play it for myself in my head.

What I cannot do is conjure up a mental image of a lamb.

In this case, I can use words to tell you what a lamb looks like. A lamb is white and fluffy, though in the real world it’s not the kind of bright bleached white that you’d see in a cartoon or a children’s book. It has four legs. A “little” lamb is small (obviously) but even a fully grown sheep is smaller than a cow. I’m much better at verbal descriptions of images than at verbal descriptions of songs.

But I still can’t make a picture of a lamb — or really anything — in my head. I can remember descriptive facts about things, but I can’t play mental slideshows or movies or reimagine old images.

For a while, I assumed everyone was like this, that if someone said a character in a film adaptation of a book wasn’t what they pictured, they were speaking metaphorically. I never imagined they might have had an actual picture in their head of what the character should look like.

Then, in college, a professor lecturing about the philosophy of mind mentioned that some people can’t picture things in their heads and mistakenly think other people are speaking metaphorically when they do this (he mentioned his colleague Derek Parfit, the esteemed moral philosopher, as one such person). And I realized, “Hey, that’s me!” Knowledge of this difference had been percolating on some level for generations, but it wasn’t until 2015 that scientists writing in the journal Cortex gave it a name — aphantasia. And because people love reading about themselves, I’m always curious when new aphantasia stories come out.

Yet the newest one, a long essay by Larissa MacFarquhar in the New Yorker titled “Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound,” made me a bit angry.

I don’t have many opportunities to take identity-based umbrage at other people’s journalism, but in this case, I thought she provided a one-sided and impoverished view of the condition, depicting non-visualizers as emotionally crippled. And I think there’s a strong case that we bring some real virtues to the table in terms of even-keeled response in a world where the rest of you are excessively motivated by vivid imagery.

A non-photographic memory