The Blank Screen in My Head

I found out I had aphantasia recently, which means I spent over forty years not realising that when people said "picture this" they meant it literally.

Aphantasia is the absence of voluntary visual imagery. When you close your eyes and someone says "imagine a beach," I get the concept of a beach. The word. The knowledge of what a beach contains — sand, water, the sounds and smells that are most common. But I don't see anything. The screen is blank. It's always been blank. I just assumed everyone else's was too, and "visualise" was a figure of speech, like "I see what you mean."

The moment I realised other people actually see things in their minds — actual images, with colour and shape and detail — was disorienting in a way I still haven't fully processed. Every time someone had said "close your eyes and picture it," they'd been asking me to use a sense I don't have. And I'd been faking it without knowing I was faking it, which is its own strange thing.

What I have instead is a kind of library of memories of thoughts and feelings. The memory of a sound. The memory of a moment. When I write, I don't see the scene. I feel my way through it. Which might be why I write the way I do — in sensation and compression rather than visual description. It's not a style choice. It's the equipment I've got.

The part that unsettles me is the link with autobiographical memory. There's research — not conclusive, but enough to notice — suggesting that people with aphantasia may also have weaker episodic memory. Fewer vivid personal memories. More facts, less film. I recognise this in myself and I don't love it. I remember that things happened. I remember what I thought about them. But the sensory playback that other people seem to have — the ability to re-experience a moment — I'm not sure I've ever had that.

I don't know what this means for a writer. Or a person. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. I write about memory constantly, and it turns out my relationship with it is different from a lot of people's .

But the blank screen isn't empty exactly. It's just not visual. There's a lot going on in there. It just doesn't look like anything.