You don’t need a vision

When the mind’s eye is blind

Thursday, June 10, 2021

I first discovered aphantasia when I wrote a post about having an imagination (“images in the head”) and a few people wrote to me and told me they literally can’t form pictures in their heads. This information blew my mind, and I’ve been fascinated ever since.

In The New York Times this week, Carl Zimmer follows up his original article with a report on the ways scientists are studying aphantasia, along with its opposite, hyperphantasia, or a mind’s eye that’s so vivid it’s sometimes hard to distinguish between what’s real and what’s not.

Ed Catmull, who co-founded Pixar and helped make huge advances in 3-D animation, announced “my mind’s eye is blind” a few years ago, and even found other animators at Pixar with aphantasia. He told the BBC that aphantasia helps clear up “some misconceptions about creativity”:

“People had conflated visualisation with creativity and imagination and one of the messages is, ‘they’re not the same thing’.

“The other one I think that people might have assumed, but if you think about it you can see why it’s false assumption, is you would think if a person could visualise, they’re more likely to be able to draw.

“If you open your eyes and you take out a pencil and pad, how many people can draw what they see? The answer is a very small number, so if you can’t draw what is in front of you then why would we expect that you would be able to draw what you visualise?”

my zine, *How to Talk to Someone with a Missing Imagination*

I used to be one of those people who conflated creativity with imagination! When I first heard about aphantasia, it sounded like a disability to me, but I quickly learned that it can actually be helpful, depending on what you’re trying to do. For example, I read about a writer who said that since she doesn’t think in images, there’s no need to translate them, so it’s easier to get thoughts down on the page. (My friend Kelli Anderson talked to a designer with aphantasia who said she worked with “a tinkering, try-things-out process.”)

Fantasy novelist Mark Lawrence wrote an essay about his experience with aphantasia, and lo and behold, he discovered his condition the same way Ed Catmull did: by being asked to visualize something during meditation. At first, Lawrence says he felt robbed of something, but then he came around:

These days, I reject the description of aphantasia as a defect. I see it as an alternative. You see a horse if asked to imagine one. I find this rather limiting. I imagine a web of horse-stuff that leads me down many paths. The idea of seeing one particular horse actually lacks appeal. What if it’s not the horse I want? What if I want something larger, more fundamental than an image?

Lawrence also notes he was shocked to discover “there are people who don’t hear an inner voice.” In Blake Ross’s essay about what it’s like to have aphantasia, he describes what goes through his mind all day, instead of pictures: “All narration, all the time. An infinite script of milk voice dialogue. When you read a sarcastic essay from me, it is a transcript of this voice.” (A man in Carl Zimmer’s article described aphantasia as “thinking only in radio.”)

Now I feel like I’m missing out on something!

Read more: “Images in the head”

WE SEE WITH TWO EYES

Monday, February 11, 2008

“The resonances of losing stereoscopy can be unexpectedly far-reaching, causing not only a problem in judging depth and distance, but a “flattening” of the whole visual world, a flattening that is both perceptual and emotional. People in this situation speak of feeling “disconnected,” of a difficulty in relating themselves not only spatially but emotionally to what they are seeing. The return of binocular vision, if this occurs, can thus give great pleasure and relief, as the world once again seems visually and emotionally rich.
—Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia

Reading through Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia, I was struck by the idea that it might be our deficiencies or our weaknesses that lead us to our talents.

Art Spiegelman has amblyopia, or lazy eye — he’s virtually blind in his left eye.

“[W]hich means that I don’t have binocular vision, and have difficulty seeing in three dimensions. This might have been part of what made me a cartoonist rather than a baseball player. I was rotten at sports, but I found that if I could draw good caricatures of the teachers I wouldn’t be doomed to be the butt of everybody’s scorn.”

Today I found a good scan of Spiegelman’s cartoon, “Eye Ball,” which originally ran in the New Yorker:

(Why such an interest in vision? I should note that I have poor eyesight, mild red/green colorblindness, and a grandmother with cataracts and glaucoma. I’m terrified of going blind!)

Ever since I read David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge, I’ve been very interested in binocular vision. Longtime readers might remember this sketchbook page from a post I did about the tyranny of linear perspective in comics:

Thinking about all this, I dug up an old New Yorker article by Oliver Sacks about stereoscopic vision (the article is called “Stereo Sue” — I’ll post the beginning in the comments below). Sacks talks about the discovery of stereoscopic vision, and then some alternatives for those who don’t have it:

There are, of course, many other ways of judging depth: occlusion of distant objects by closer objects, perspective (the fact that distant objects appear smaller), shading (which delineates the shape of objects), “aerial” perspective (the blurring and bluing of more distant objects by the intervening air), and, most important, motion parallax–the change of spatial relationships as we move our heads. All these cues, acting in tandem, can give a vivid sense of reality and space and depth. But the only way to actually perceive depth rather than judge it is with binocular stereoscopy.

And uh, well, I guess that’s all I’ve got on the subject at this point…