Aphantasia is the inability to voluntarily create mental images. People with this condition can’t picture things in their mind’s eye. Many also can’t recall smells, sounds, or tactile sensations. Some even have difficulty recognizing faces.

Aphantasia Test

I have severe aphantasia. When I close my eyes, I can’t visualize anything at all. At work, I constantly forget my colleagues’ names, which makes it embarrassing to ask them again. Growing up, I don’t have many visual memories. The things I can recall that are related to aphantasia are falling off the back of an abandoned pickup truck, and a memory from when I was about one year old — staying at my uncle’s house, not being able to find the bathroom, pooping on the bed, and then hiding in the wardrobe until I was found.

I discovered that dreams could actually have visuals around 2–3 years after graduating college, during a casual conversation with my girlfriend. After that, I took the aphantasia test and confirmed that I have a severe case. In my work and studies, I understand problems more through a sense of “concepts.” I can’t truly empathize with the scenarios others describe. In high school, I was pretty confused by geometry problems and poetry, and I absolutely hated memorization — because I’d never experienced what it was like to “replay” something in my mind.

I feel fortunate to have chosen programming as my career. It comes naturally to me — I can quickly grasp code implementations and context. For someone like me who can’t visualize, this saves a tremendous amount of effort. Using LSP tools in an IDE, I can rapidly connect different parts of a feature tree and think laterally. This indexing method feels a lot like a B+ tree implementation to me.

At this point, I actually think aphantasia is a blessing in disguise. My girlfriend sometimes has a rough day because of a nightmare, but I don’t have that problem. When I wake up, about 95% of whatever I dreamed fades away almost instantly. My experience of dreaming is more about whether the emotions during sleep felt good or bad. When something unpleasant happens, I can quickly assess the situation and move on without getting stuck in negative emotions for too long.

The downside is that my memory works like volatile storage that lazy-loads — for things I’ve forgotten, I’ll recall them reflexively when I’m back in the same or a similar setting, kind of like an amnesia patient recovering memories. For me, this actually means I can quickly let go of bad experiences and live in the present without being haunted by the past. I used to worry I might have Alzheimer’s, but after confirming it’s aphantasia, I’ve come to appreciate being able to simply enjoy the here and now.

I’ve seen a lot of discussions about aphantasia on V2EX. If you’re curious, check out what others have to say about this condition: