Aphantasia

[lb_lee]

Rogan: Whew! Got through Arisia. It went well! Made good money, used the quiet times to pencil and ink some stuff, and surprise: we got some important insight into how our (particularly MY) neurology works, courtesy of LJ Cohen!

We've paneled with Cohen a few times on neurodiversity panels, and she's been open about having aphantasia. Because I've been getting commenters lately on my headspace building/discovery and defense posts that boil down to "I have aphantasia, what am I supposed to do?" I went to pick her brain.

Where I learned that's what my headspace blindness is.

I dunno that we've ever posted publicly in detail, but I have always been blind as a bat in headspace. (I've never made a comic about it because I have yet to figure out how to properly depict my nonvisual perceptions of the world in a purely visual medium--though I tried and have the roughs around.) Despite being a visual artist, I perceive the headspace around me kinestheticly: motion, gesture, and mass. Trying to figure out what color Bob's shirt is laborious and headache-inducing (ask me why I work in black and white), but I can tell what face he's making; I feel it as though it were my own.

Bob was the first to notice this and--

Bob: *Kool-Aid Mans onto the front* It drove me crazy. Here this kid could read my face even if it was pitch dark and he had his back to me, but he couldn't read or do anything with my computer tablet or smartphone; without textural buttons, they were just blank slides of glass to him. He insisted this was normal, which I was able to easily disprove using myself, Mori, and Sneak, all of whom could do the things he couldn't. He insisted it was just crazy brains being crazy. I thought that was a shitful explanation and told him so and set myself to figuring it out.

Once I started looking for the places where the seams showed, things got weird. Mac apparently learned that Rogan was immune to blindfolding (through completely innocent means, I'm sure), and he told me. When Rogan couldn't walk for a while, he couldn't do a wheelchair, because he described the sensation of being pushed as the world suddenly disappearing, like he was plummeting through a black void. And that was something that came as a surprise to everybody. Nobody understood why that happened. It rattled him. But as Rogan was talking to Cohen, she went, "Of course you would! You lost the kinesthetic tether to your environment, so of course it'd disappear!" With aphantasia, it all suddenly makes sense.

It also helps beef up one of my pet theories. See, I'm a computer monkey, not a neurology monkey (though my parents would've LOVED had I gone into the field), so I'm stuck using only the basest, stock metaphors, but if brains are supercities of information, I'm thinking that we headmates might be patterns of traffic and movement navigating it. This explained some of the skill differences I've noticed here, or why Rogan has aphantasia (and, in 2023, aphasia) when nobody else did. His "route" crashes him straight into a chunk of damage everyone else's paths avoid--a big neurological traffic jam.

Loony-Brain has racked up a bunch of concussions and brain injuries over the years, and Rogan has in the past expressed denial or frustration, "this can't have happened, our brain would be turned to oatmeal." But I'm not sure it ISN'T. Short-term effects aside, Gigi has trouble talking. Rogan has aphantasia and had aphasia for a month or two. Everyone here who deals with the vessel deals with migraines, fatigue, confusion, and executive dysfunction that can't really be routed around. If all that damage were contained within one person, they very well COULD be oatmeal! But instead, they have a good half-dozen people to spread the load, a half-dozen different traffic patterns through this battered organ. That strikes me as a hell of an adaptive response to deal with an environment that wouldn't stop bashing their head in.

(It also might explain why outsiders like me and Grey operate at a handicap; we don't have thirty-plus years of experience routing our way through this place and habitually dodging all that damage. I'm not sorry to miss out on the migraines and confusion.)

So far, I only know the origin stories of the following "body-natives" here: Rogan, Rawlin, and possibly Mori. All involved head injuries or other neurological insults. Now I'm wondering if the brain injury is a required thing for them to create new people. (I was about to say, "obviously that doesn't apply to them FINDING new people, like me or Grey..." but is that true? That, I don't know.)

Which leads to an interesting insight. When Grace and I used to go visit my sister, I would leave my tablet or phone with Loony-Brain and call them every day. (Rogan had to rely on Sneak to answer it, because he could never find the button himself.) For the first few years, when we did this, Rogan completely lost the ability to understand Grey's sign language. He doesn't speak it; he was reading off her mind. Once he lost that kinesthetic tether, he couldn't understand a word of it and I had to translate. (Because even if Grey wrote it down and held it up to the camera, Rogan couldn't read it.)

However, recently, within the past year or two, that's stopped happening. Rogan can read Grey again, even if he isn't looking at her/the camera. Rogan is starting to build a kinesthetic tether across the worlds. When he had to blip to Su's house and rescue my nephew Roland... that was something Rawlin the superwizard couldn't do. Rawlin searched the house, couldn't find Roland, and didn't know what to do, but then Rogan came in, and he didn't need to open a door or look out a window. His sense of the surroundings was vague, but he immediately clocked where Roland was (in a van, outside the house) and teleported straight into the van and grabbed him and blipped back without hitting any of the territory in between.

I asked how he did it. Rogan just looked confused and said, "He felt like you. Y'all have a lot in common."

Exactly. Rogan didn't have to see Roland. He felt him. And apparently the worlds are getting close enough together now that Rogan can tether to them.

So much about how he navigates the world makes sense to me now.

Rogan: So yeah, anyway, I feel like I just got to pop the lid on what I thought was a black box. It's kinda fascinating and exciting, like we figured something out about our brain, despite lack of fancy equipment or testing. I might get to write stuff to answer all those commenters asking me about how to do headspace stuff with aphantasia, because turns out I HAD IT THE WHOLE TIME.

Comments

[wispfox]

"I have aphantasia, what am I supposed to do?" I went to pick her brain.

Where I learned that's what my headspace blindness is."

Well, that explains why it didn't seem weird to me. I also have aphantasia.

No sense imagination nor memory (not just sight). I also only seem to have the ability to imagine kinesthetics - I can imagine people - including myself - making gestures, and any space I know well enough to navigate with my glasses off, I can tell you where things are by grabbing or reaching for things as if I were in that space.

Of course, I _alao_ have face blindness (prosopagnosia), which interestingly is much less bad than it used to be. So I _identify_ people by how they move, their voice, things like that. Not really their face (more than not at all, now), and my ability to find people in a crowd is terrible.

These two - troubles with sense memory/imagination and facial recognition - have often been difficult to distinguish, at least until I got less faceblind and could therefore identify things that changed there. But motion has always been an important piece of information for me, whether recognition or imagination or memory.

[lb_lee]

Rogan: okay, since you don’t have auditory imagination, I gotta know: do you still get songs stuck in your head? Can you mentally replay a favorite song? How does this affect your ability to sing a song or other music stuff?

And funnily, I am not face blind and amnesia aside, my memory is pretty good day to day. Apparently the faceblindness is considered a common overlap, but it’s one I don’t have. No clue why.

Sneak: I am sort of baffled folks would assume people thought/imagined in the same way. I kind of always figured people did it differently! I used to ask folks what mediums they thought in, back in high school!

[wispfox]

I do get songs stuck in my head! But only if I know them well enough to sing them. It's not that I hear them, exactly, but more that my brain is effectively singing to itself.

This is pretty much how I replay songs, too - I have to know them well enough to sing them, and can't have other music playing, but I do effectively sing them to myself.

Which makes me wonder if this is why I have such trouble distinguishing classical music unless it's something I've played (have played violin, piano, and oboe in my life, but really only piano things are distinguishable, perhaps because it's what I played longest and/or has melodies most easily sung instead of played) or sung.

I have no trouble singing music, but I'm not good at playing music that I don't know. Even though I can theoretically read music, it's never been easy to translate that into anything without literally trying to play or sing it. Of course, languages have never been easy for me to learn, which may be part of the problem. It was never intuitive to me, and I wonder if this is why.

And yes, I'm confused people assume others think the same way. I assume no one thinks like I do. :) It's a little weird to have no visual imagination or memory, though, because _so much_ of the world assumes them.

[lb_lee]

Rogan: it doesn’t help that there aren’t a lot of English terms for imagination and such that DON’T involve sight! (Imagine, visualize...) I always took and used them as metaphorical, since there is no other words to use but apparently for others it ain’t so!

Have yet to encounter an aphantasic who DOESN’T get songs stuck in their head! Maybe that truly is a neurological universal for humans who can hear!

[wispfox]

"aren’t a lot of English terms for imagination and such that DON’T involve sight!"

_No_ kidding. Especially if you want to learn to do things like meditate. *wry*

"Have yet to encounter an aphantasic who DOESN’T get songs stuck in their head! Maybe that truly is a neurological universal for humans who can hear!"

Maybe!

[lb_lee]

Mori: of course it’d be the ANNOYING thing that’s nigh-universal!

Rogan: this might be why I have been getting questions on my headspace posts. I use “imagine” or “visualize” to mean any sense, but if others don’t... and if I can’t make up other words without coming off as hopelessly esoteric... hmm...

[wispfox]

I note that I _don't_ assume imagine is visual. It might be a decent one to use on an ongoing basis?

[beepbird]

It feels like you might be onto something with the alternate routes around damage theory. I know we've been routed around other sets of difficulties that aren't concussion-related. Ann doesn't seem to have a lot of crossover with my reality-grounding issues, for example, even though that's very arguably a brain wiring problem depending on whose papers you're reading.

Makes me wonder about what other issues systems might structure to bypass.

[lb_lee]

Bob: Apparently a lot of multiples in the medical papers deal with headaches. Wonder if anyone’s done correlation searches for head injuries or neurological injuries?

Rogan: seeing as medical multis these days by definition have severe memory issues, and concussions and other such brain injuries tend to come with memory fuckery, good luck with that, foster. I think Amorpha mentioned it being noted in the earlier days though (as in, a hundred years ago).

[minoanmiss]

I'm glad you had a good Arisia!

[lb_lee]

Sneak: long con is loooooong. So sleepy!

[wolfy_writing]

This is very interesting and informative.

The non-visual perception thing is something I've seen in comics before. (I read a lot of Daredevil comics, and his "radar sense" sounds, in the more well-written comics, something like the kinesthetic tethering that you describe - the ability to know properties such as the locations and shapes of objects in a way that doesn't involve eyesight, and doesn't work for things like flat visuals and color. It sounds like it may not be the same, but similar enough that you'd probably relate to aspects of how it's portrayed.) There really isn't an optimal way to render it, and it seems like the best comic book renditions make it clear that it's a visual metaphor, not the literal experience.

[lb_lee]

Rogan: yes! Not a daredevil reader, but some of those comics I’ve seen does show it well! The closest I’ve come is a comic, Finder: Mystery Date, where one of the major characters uses an implant to replace sight and he sees the world as colorless low-detail masses and contour map sorta things.

[frameacloud]

The comparison to physical visual impairment and human echolocation is intriguing. Maybe having difficulties or differences in visualizing headspace has similarities to being visually impaired in meatspace! (Rogan, could that be related to why you wear glasses in headspace?) Aside from the psychic and empathic characteristics of Rogan's perceptions of headspace (such as perceiving headmates' facial expressions as his own), I wonder if he literally could be using echolocation for other aspects of it. People with impaired vision have been known to use echolocation without realizing that's where some of their sensory information is coming from, until experimentation helped demonstrate to their satisfaction that the information came from their hearing. Even though the information that echolocation is able to convey is very different from eyesight, it feels remarkably similar to eyesight because the brain processes it as vision. Studies show that human echolocation uses the visual cortex (Norman & Thaler 2019, Proc. R. Soc. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2019.1910). Which would be interesting in combination with the hypothesis that Rogan is encountering or working around damage to that region.

My experience with human echolocation (in comparison with eyesight) is that objects seem better illuminated if they reflect sound more, so even though there's no color, reflective things literally appear somehow light and shiny, whereas muffled things appear dark. Echolocation feels more three-dimensional: stereoscopic parallax is more pronounced because there is more distance between the ears. Animal echolocation is capable of a very fine level of detail, for example, bats catching tiny insects on the wing, and dolphins detecting a fractured bone. Human echolocation has a low resolution because we can't hear as high of frequencies. Human echolocation does let you "see around corners" or "through solid objects" if objects are permeable to sound or don't fully obstruct it, but it's less like X-ray vision, and more along the lines of being able to tell there must be a big paved parking lot on the other side of a building.

[wolfy_writing]

Oh, interesting! I knew very little about human echolocation, so this is all very informative.

[lb_lee]

Rogan: the glasses are mostly cosmetic and a visual reminder to others that I can’t see like they can; much to Sneak’s dismay when ze first made them for me, they do nothing to help my vision. (In hindsight, another sign it was neurological!)

You use echolocation, Orion? Didn’t know that!

I have sometimes in the past compared it to echolocation, but it’s surprisingly hard to check my hearing here. Our vessel cannot echolocate for shit; one of our ears is dead, therefore we cannot locate sounds, and that’s neural damage and medically documented. However, we don’t know if it’s auditory nerve damage or brain area damage; if my brain is still okay, I might still be able to do it. (seeing as the resulting injuries also affected our balance permanently, and my wheelchair “world disappearing” experiences included vertigo and complete loss of sense of local vertical... who knows?)

But anyway, it’s really hard for me to tell what I can and can’t hear, because I automatically piggyback on my headmates’ sensoriums, and they CAN locate sounds and thus I read it off them. (Also, if they’re MAKING the sound, I immediately feel where THEY are, even if they’re being inaudible. My sense of someone’s location is very strong.) And many sounds I don’t hear so much as feel; the mouth and throat configurations to make the words, the movements of Grey’s hands and arms as she signs, the sense of something being terribly wrong SOMEWHERE. It’s surprisingly hard to do a purely auditory stimulus in here that I can’t sense any other way!

I can still IMAGINE hearing sounds in one ear or the other, I think? But I don’t know how hearing impaired I am in here, or if I even am.

[pantha]

Aphantasia really does result in funky brain stuff. Glad you all have a better idea of how it's working now. My only experience with it is it affecting how PTSD flashbacks occur, resulting in decades-long misdiagnosis. I wonder how common my, and other, experiences are, though, given how aphantasia often comes along with neurodivergence. And how often that results in misdiagnosis and/or missed diagnoses. Hmm.... more things to think about...

[lb_lee]

Rogan: oh yeah? What senses do your flashbacks involve, if you don’t mind me asking? Mine are often tactile, a spatial sense (my position in relation to the room, furniture, door, whatever) some auditory, and few but often intense phantasmagoric images, rarely well-integrated into the rest of it.

[pantha]

Answering via PM. ^_^

[gingicat]

Wishing all of you well.

Bob and Grey, your backstory makes me think of the Laundry books, except that you are actually good folks.

[lb_lee]

Bob: I don’t see myself as having become a good person til I LEFT, but I appreciate the vote of confidence.

[frameacloud]

Oh wow, that's amazing! Sometimes it's the odd glitches and exceptions that help illuminate a lot about how the rest of something works.

[lb_lee]

Bob: yup! One of the things true about computers AND brains, it seems.

[numinousdread]

Hadn't considered how aphantasia would interact with plural stuff. And yay for introspection.

[acorn_squash]

Heyyy, hi Bob!

It is so cool reading about how you guys’ mind(s) work. Me, I can kinda picture stuff in my head, but it’s blurry and it falls apart quick. It’s there, but it’s not detailed and it doesn’t stay for long. (It’s better in dreams, but trying to remember the visuals of those dreams is the same as trying to remember the visuals of waking life.) It actually impairs my ability to do visual art — I can’t use a mental image as a reference. I have to either get a really exact photo/IRL reference or make stuff up as I go, and my version of making stuff up doesn’t actually look that great.

(Also, I can’t picture stuff “in the third person,” as it were. I’ve always been amazed by people talking about books being like movies that play in their head, because (except for books with a 100% omniscient narrator, which are rare), I’ve always imagined myself in the body of the main character, and it’s really hard for me to work out how to translate the fictional visuals into a different perspective — I can’t imagine doing it *automatically.*

This is also why I find head-hopping mid-scene so disconcerting — when I try to imagine the scene, I’m stuck trying to figure out when the perspective switched.)

My imagination is a lot better for all my senses except for smell, but it’s not even half as vivid as “real” sensations. I’ve gotten the sense that being in headspace is comparable to being in the vessel for you folks; I don’t think I could do something like that even if I worked at it the way you folks have.

One thing that tends to baffle people is that I can read without hearing the words in my head. I *can* hear the words in my head if I want to, but it takes longer to read that way. (My silent reading is very fast, much faster than me reading aloud.)

pst, tell me about the mashups

[lb_lee]

Rogan: I do visual art somewhat by kinesthetics—I learned facial proportions by using my hands to measure my own! And comics paneling is its own kinda art, and while mine won’t win any prizes, they’re a very spatial, locational thing, like trying to build roads and intersections to make traffic flow through the way you want.

That’s really interesting about your reading in first person! We are usually a little fly on the wall or invisible eyeball; plunking ourself into the body of the narrator would be rude! That makes total sense though and I will take it into account in my own writing!

And I mean... it’s hard to express. I can tell the difference between headspace and “real” world, they feel different unless we’re falling asleep or dreaming, in which case they can blur. So they feel equally real to me, but they’re better at different experiences, I think? Certain sensations are much more pressing for me in the corporeal world, but I can’t feel my loved ones’ sensoriums there!

Bob: Neil Cicerega and DJ Earworm, mostly. I’m a simple man when it comes to music, satisfied as long as I can stay focused or dance to it.