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Fascinating! From an amateur writer with pictures in my head, this was eye-opening. Thank you for sharing 🙏

I'm a writer with aphantasia and an avid reader. I never knew I was different until my 30s. I do dream like a movie, but as soon as I wake up it fades SUPER FAST. I remember the elements, but I can't see it. I also cannot recall memories visually. It's more like a library of stories in my head with no pictures. With writing I am just making 1000000 decisions about every single detail. I lean into symbolism more than my other writing friends. I think and imagine in words and I think it helps me in some ways because I don’t have to try to make the pictures in my head match the perfect word choice on the paper. Instead it all comes in words first. I also find I lean a lot into emotion and interiority of characters more than what things look like. I also like using things like playlists, vision boards, drawn maps etc...to help when I need to.

It’s easier without SDAM. 🌹j.

Your writing setup in the A5 plotter is a dream. I use my A5 for writing as well. How do you print on the plotter inserts? I’ve tried and it always prints extremely faint.

Love your system! It’s the cats meow😺

Well this is being saved. I idolize your organization!!! That WILL be me one day...hopefully...maybe

Great video! How has working with this Oracle been? Would you recommend this deck? The artwork is so beautiful and this deck has been on my radar for almost a year and a mainstay/ping pongs between my Etsy saved for later & actual cart but every time I do buy a deck, there’s always ones that I purchase over this. I’m curious how working together has been and if you still currently read with it? Thanks love!

Holly crap the opening sent me into a major panic attack. Had to stop. And yes I am 77 found out by early video. What the I know what it is going to be BLACK. But attempting freaks me out. I went 72 years before I found out why I was the weird one. Why I stopped reading after the pictures were gone. Of course. I had school but I listened and reguratated the answers for tests. Reading how do you know what they are talking about and now I am bored. Hey did not mean to say anything disrespectful. Just the way I reacted. Thank you

I have aphantasia but weirdly when i took a facial recognition test it said i was a "super-recogniser" with exceptional ability to recall and distingush between faces. I think aphantasiacs DO have the ability to visualise but some kind of mental censor blocks it out. If you say "imagine yourself on a beach" i get a feint, latent "echo" of beachiness but then a ceaseless neurotic processing takes over asking "well, WHICH beach, a desert island beach or an English beach?", no platonic "beach" appears and it's the same story with that damn apple.

I read an intereview of a person with aphantasia last year and the dream thing came up. They said that they think they see the dreams but can't really be sure. The memory of the dream is like a memory of a movie watched, and with aphantasia, the memory isn't visual, but you still know you saw it. For me dreams are, like you mentioned all 5 senses, but my visual thinking limits to almost invisible flashes of the shapes, and if I try to visualize the spaces or objects, I think of them in a tactile or spatial way. For dreams, I remember that I saw them, like the person in the interview said, but I know I've been there because the spatial memory is more "vivid".

Couldn't help myself - as soon as it started I thought "Awww, Thing from the Addams Family has a playmate!" Spent the whole video going "Da da da dum, click click! Da da da dum, click click!" An enjoyable and instructive video, thank you!

I really needed this. And I really needed to know there are other writers who face this like I do.

Your an NPC. " Back drop person ! You didn't mention that you don't have an inner monologue !

Same here! I have complete aphantasia when i'm awake. No visuals, no mental sound etc. and i've always been this way but my dreams are vivid and i never know i'm dreaming until i wake up and go "oh, that was a dream". I'm with you "yes! Yes! Same!" I don't know how to describe it but I can sort of "feel" (not literally) things, like say i'm reading a scene i can "feel" where the characters are or I can think about my childhood bedroom and I can draw a picture of it, a rough sketch with just outlines of where everything was, no details and I can't see it, but I can remember it. I've heard it described as spatial awareness. I remember other stuff as facts, like my mom's height/hair and eye color etc. I can't see her face in my mind but I know these things as facts. I'm also a writer and a reader. I love books and stories and story telling and fantasy. My favorite genres are horror and nonfiction but I read everything and i'm currently writing a fantasy story! Science fiction, fantasy, horror, contemporary, historical, romance, etc. I have ptsd for multiple reasons and I believe (for me at least i'm not saying anyone else has to feel this way) that my ptsd would be worse if I could visualize and i've heard as much, how horrorific ptsd can be, from others that can visualize. I have had ptsd nightmares, which granted i think are real as i'm dreaming so that's horrorific and i've had plenty of panic attacks while awake but at least awake I don't see anything. I might think back to the triggering memory, but I don't see it or smell it or hear it all over again, you know? So personally I see it as every way, aphantasia and phantasia, has pros and cons. I could go on and on lol. Because this is what i've always known and it works well for me, i'm happy with aphantasia. And my imagination works just fine, it's just different, and I love to be creative. I cry at books all the time. Will I remember the outfit a character wore? Highly unlikely. Will I remember how I felt about the character? Yes. Can I love the fictional characters? Yes. I'm definitely character driven over plot. Sorry if this is all over the place lol. I can't remember songs, not entirely but I do remember beats (how this works I can't describe since I can't literally hear anything) and I tend to remember chorus's, lol. That's it. I am good at remembering things people said though. I am apparently what's called an intuitive pantser, I'll know a little before I start writing but not much. A premise, vague plot points, vibes, maybe a theme or maybe not. Random disorganized notes. But basically the story comes to me (in concepts I guess and dialogue - I can think in silent words, that's how I read for example, etc.) as i'm writing it. Maybe scenes. I'll write random notes in scrivener as I think of things, including things i'm not at yet in the story, different ways things might go, and what happens might still be a complete surprise to me when I finally get there. It's magical. I can't explain it but I can't outline because if I outline my brain goes "well the story is done, all done, time to move onto the next one" even though not a word of it was written and all motivation to actually write it is gone, so this is how I have to write. It's terrifying to be honest but I love it and somehow, it works. I struggled with reading comprehension in school. I could read...fast. That was my problem. I'm also autistic and my processor works but it's slow. I can read faster than I can process the words because reading requires me to think about what i'm reading. Fiction is harder than nonfiction for me, I can have to think and "feel" the spatial awareness stuff and of scenes, which I have to actively think of, remember plot etc. I did read some as a kid. I loved horror so when I saw Goosebumps covers in the 90s at scholastic book fairs I was a moth and they were the flame, so from them I learned that reading could be fun, even if it was difficult to remember what I read. Read some Fear Street and Stephen King as a teenager. Then only a few nonfiction books after I graduated from school in 2007 until 2015 when I said I wanted to learn how to read and remember stuff. I hadn't been allowed to read Harry Potter as a kid despite wanting to so I started there, then found booktube and it spiraled from there. What I learned, was I just needed to slow down. I have to slow down to match my processor, but I can. I hope that makes sense. Sorry i've written a novel here.

At 32 years old, I've recently realized that I have Aphantasia. I've always been a fan of reading and writing, I adore words and am a big fan of storytelling in general. Since realizing that most people can actually SEE images in their head (still blows my mind to think about), I've been noticing that most of the stories I enjoy, are very character-driven. I've never been a big fan of action in writing, which I suppose makes sense looking back. Much like you've spoken about here, when I write, a lot of my descriptions tend to be emotion-based, or relay on other senses rather than visual. I never had any real issues with reading other people's visual descriptions, but I do sometimes find myself skimming them quickly, in order to get to the "good part"; Which to me, lies in emotional, often inter-personal drama. In my own writing, I've noticed that I sometimes refer to a character's vibe or aura, and when applicable, I usually fall back on tactile descriptors (E.g. textures, temperature etc) more than anything else. Even when I do try to describe a visual, it tends to be very spatially-driven, such as describing the distances between certain characters or objects. When I do make references to visual aspects, such as colors or lighting, it's usually a narrative plot-device - Like, describing a light shinning through the window, tells the reader that it's daytime, without me having to outright explain that it's day. Sometimes I'll embellish these descriptions to make them a bit more interesting, but it's never been because I believed people would actually see what I'm describing in their head. I just go into detail because I love writing, and enjoy finding the words to describe what I'm trying to convey in a captivating manner. I mean, if I have to set up the scene anyway, I always try to make it enjoyable to read. So I guess these could be seen as "visual descriptors", but honestly that's never my actual intention. None of this was a conscious decision, by the way. Purely visual descriptors just never came very naturally to me, which is why I rarely use them.. And when I do, I think it's mostly because I've learned that's how it "should" be done. I've honestly never given it much thought before discovering Aphantasia, it just felt natural to me to describe things this way, since this is how I see the world and experience my own memories. I simply never knew that most people didn't experience it the same way I did lol. Looking back at some of my writing (I mostly write fan fiction for genre shows I love), knowing what I know now, is honestly pretty hilarious. Like, I've written a whole 60K word fanfic about two characters forming a mental telepathic connection - Where, among other things, I've referred to the main character's "mind's eye" as a "dark void", stating that having the other person in her head, helped "light up the usual darkness" she'd see every time she closed her eyes. Later in that same story, when she has trouble "clearing her mind", I even made a reference to how she has always hated meditation for this very reason lol. Like, all the signs were honestly always there - And looking back I'm kinda amazed that people actually read and liked (I hope at least) the story, since I think I've done a poor job of representing most people's experience of a "mind's eye". Then again, I suppose said character never stated on the show that she didn't have Aphantasia, so maybe the readers assumed this was just my own interpretation... And who knows, some readers could have Aphantasia as well, whether they know it or not haha. Anyway, just thought I'd share because I find this topic very interesting and rarely see people discussing it. Thank you for making this video! I relate to a lot of what you've described, and it makes me feel better about my own writing, to hear it being described as a potential benefit as well and not just a lack.

This is wild bro you need like an hour long special

great book! I am an avid reader and have mainly skipped descriptive parts.

Woahhhhh !!! I feel like not so alone now…

The one reason I'm grateful for my aphantasia is that i can't visualise nightmares, but somehow when i wake up i know i had a nightmare even though nothing visual happened in my brain

Aphant here... no sound memories and as it turns out neither is there an internal vocabulary of smells, so I made a lousy sommelier. Like you I have spatial memories and can remember things said to me that had an emotional impact. I have stalled with writing as my descriptive powers are so limited. I wrote a screenplay so that someone else could cast the characters and create the sets, but was told the story needs to be told as a novel with lots more detail for the historical setting. I'm stuck. Painting is another creative venue that I have suspended in frustration.

My wife and I both love to read, and she is a very vivid visualizer while I have aphantasia. She was asking me how I can get so engrossed in a book when I can't see it, and I said because without the visual sense, I instead hear the story in my mind, the inflection of the spoken words, like a performance - even the narrative sections have a tone and pace like narration. I feel the scene, I hear it, I smell it. My other interior senses fill in for the lack of visualization so much that I never even realized I had no mind's eye until I was 40. The other interesting difference between us is that I care about, and am moved by, the choice of words and the style of writing much more than my wife. She prioritizes clear descriptions so she can picture what's going on, to the extent that she's actually put off by literary fiction that plays too much with language and form because it gets in the way for her. I, on the other hand, really relish great writing, and can get lost in how a writer expresses their ideas, even when they go off on long non-visual, atmospheric tangents. I've wondered if that might be due to our differences in visualization.

In October of 2022, at 68 years of age, I discovered I had aphantasia. I was having a casual conversation with my daughter. She said you know how you visualize it in your head. I said no. She was blown away. She had seen some things about aphantasia on Tic-Toc. A week later, I found out I also had no internal monologue. I don't feel upset about it. It just means I'm a unique person. I can read. I've kept a journal on and off since I was 11 years old, and my daughter tells me having aphantasia and no internal monologue is why I'm so chill. I'm a visual learner. When people start describing how they're going to construct something, I can't picture that, so I have to wait for the project to be completed before I understand what it looks like. Friends and family do comment about my memory and how well I remember things. My hope is to meet someone one-on-one, face-to-face, and talk about it. Videos are great, but talking to another person live is my goal.

How old is your beautiful TN?!

Ah! I remember primarily amorphic colors, and that kind of spacial recall EXTREMELY clearly too! I always tell my wife how I have 'blueprint' brain. I can draw up floor plans in extreme detail of my childhood, teen years, old work places etc. But then I can't remember the faces or voices or any specifics about people that were there. I also can 'sorta' sing songs in other languages even if I can't define exactly where one word ends and another begins lol! I ALSO find AI art SUPER DUPER helpful! Translating texts to images seems like utter magic to me, since it's such a challenge in my mind. By chance have you ever taken a 4-letter (MBTI) test? Mines INTP and I'm always curious about how people's mind experience maps to it via type. Especially Thinker vs Feeler and Sensor vs Intuitive when it comes to imagination topics.

Something I always wonder about people w/ the apple question... (And you said it here) WHERE is the apple? All my imagination is either Blackbox, IE a black flat screen behind and the item renders on it individually, or I remember the object in a scene I've seen it often before. For apples, they always show up in a pile in the supermarket unless I specifically try to flip and rotate it, then it goes into the blackbox rendering space. I think my digital art/programming experience has to have some foundational effect with that lol. The other thing I often notice is that I can 'imagine' or recall images WAY easier with my eyes OPEN. When I close them, the 'darkness' and verbal noisiness of my mind is too distracting (ADHD DX'd) and I find myself tempted to open my eyes and basically unfocus, dissociate, to imagine. When my eyes open, the verbal echoing is quieter, so I can focus on 'faux visuals', 'overlayed' on reality. I definitely notice, as I'm studying writing for my own stories, that some writers are simply NOT for me, b/c of the way they describe. An over-obsession with 'aesthetic scene setting' aka Flower Descriptions, REALLY distract me. I feel like I can get plot, OR scene setting, but can't fuse them. Then again, I REALLY enjoyed RR Martin's style in GoT that other people complained about, like his focus on tiny visual details like armor fluting, moisture in food, etc. In that case, I often find those details fill out my low res blurry idea of the scene in concept, and brings it into a sharper 'tableu' in my mind. Freeze-frame scenes work really well for me. Like getting a piece of key-art in a storybook to set the scene, then the characters can go about their actions but I'm not moving them around the scene. If I started trying to do that, I'd probably fail and get distracted from the plot anyway. BTW I think I'm on a scale 1-2 of Aphantasia, not true aphant aka 0. I often wonder how my terribly bad eyesight w/o glasses impacts my visual recall in my mind, since everything is SUPER blurry, as if I wasn't wearing my glasses. (Nearsighted btw, I can't read ANY text until I'm <1ft away w/o my glasses)

Looks good. I bet you could downside to the pocket rings this way-i mean the planner. The rings are small, so it looks like this plotter😂😂😂. The pages are sticking out a,little bit, but I don't care, I could cut them down a little bit if I want ❤

Leila!!! I’ve missed your words. I'm glad you found a way to use your TN. We also have a wall calendar for the house 😊

I totally get your concept for your Plotter use. I have something very similar, although sadly not a Plotter. I will get a plotter some day though.

I always wondered how my mother would just "know" what a room would look like BEFORE she redecorated it. To me, it was "witchcraft". I see absolutely nothing in my mind. I don't hear, smell, or feel anything in my mind, either. When I am reading, I find the parts with all of the description of the scenes and characters to be very boring. I just want to get on with the story itself. I was blown away when I learned that people saw "movies" in their heads when they were reading. This explained why I could read super scary stories and not have nightmares. What I can't do is go watch the movie version of those stories! I've always said that I don't see things in my mind, I just sense them. I like the explanation of have a concept of them better. I get frustrated with my aphantasia because it affects not just childhood memories, but all of my memories. I dread it when my kids ask for stories about when they were babies or children. I wish that I had realized how this would affect me because I would have written things down and recorded more.

Great video. I'm 59, love to read, and my first book (novella) is being edited now. I'm a 0 on the aphant scale. Didn't even know the minds eye was real until I was 45 or so. It still blows me we away to think about being able to 'visually hallucinate' at will.

Please tell us how you made the inserts lol they’re perfect!

For a very long time I assumed everyone had hyperphantasia and were able to visualize with all five senses engaged, and not only that but they did what my psych calls "parallel processing" of verbal thoughts and those images all the time. It just goes to show how different we are and how diverse our perspectives can be, even neurologically. Really interesting hearing your perspective as a writer!

I received my first plotter in Bible size today. I will use it for finances and projects

I found this video from your comment on an Instagram reel where you mentioned it, I've known for a while I have aphantasia but I didn't know the name for it! As a fellow fantasy writer, I can relate a lot to what you're saying, I've definitely noticed when I'm purposefully trying to craft imagery in my writing I lean into the senses of sound and smell rather than focusing primarily on the visual. This has also sent me down a rabbit hole of learning more about it!

The moment you said "visualize an apple" I was already throwing it in the air and I could feel it's skin and smell it (it was recently picked and hasn't been cleaned yet😋). By the time I realized you were still talking, your weren't talking about apples anymore🙃 I have POWERFUL ADHD and teaching me as a child in any class outside of English class was impossible- I was always already tossing the apple around 😂🤣

Hello mam, I was a brilliant visualiser. After a head injury, I acquired total aphantasia.... Can you suggest some study tips or make a separate video for someone who recently acquired aphantasia so that we can better adapt to new way of learning? ( based on how you as an aphant memorised facts and details..) I'll be highly thankful🙏🏻 Can you please answer if someone with aphantasia clear competitive exams and get a good job?

"dogs, other people are allowed to exist" Pretty sure I sat this at least once a day to my dog.

For those coming to this video thinking its easy its not. Beware all the missing variables 1. Shes added removed the nib several times and wouldnt be suprised if they were all heat set before hand 2. It is doable straight out the box BUT i would not recomend it if you want to be left with a jammed feed. Althought this is very much doable it takes considerable force and a very i mean very high propability the feed will jam because of the bottom part of the nib adding pressure to the barrel making it next to impossible to remove, i would first always make the bottom of the nib flush with the feed and tinker with it, this video is most likely of nibs which are already worn to the feed hence why it seems so easy, trust me its not i spent a whole hour removing jammed feeds doing this method. I would presonally stick to flattening the nib first otherwise you have a high risk of damaging the feed and the nib and if your lucky you might get the nib out if its jammed if its all the way in and you didnt align it properly you will need extreme i mean extreme force to remove the nib due to the bottom of the nib acting as leverage on the barrel i wpuld avoid doing this

Clear memories and images from early childhood are very sparse and rare for everybody

I'm a total aphant 😕 even silence is louder than my own thoughts

You could stack your notebooks on top of each other and cut

I just bought one of these. I didn't even know there was a tool box lol

I don't know whether i have aphantasia or not because my childhood memories ( many of them ) are still pretty vivid but i do find myself unable to picture my characters and surroundings and stuff exactly how you explained. Idk what to do about it. But thank you for assuring me that i wasn't alone.

It's so funny how aphantasia people always say "close your eyes" when they want you to visualize something because we don't need to close our eyes to visualize things. It has nothing to do with that. It's a brain-see, not an eye-see

So it's like you think in AI :D But just the text input part

I think I have hyperfantasia, thanks for talking about that!! I genuinely cannot remember a single thing unless I have pictures to remember them by or a strong visual memory from the event 😅

I'm curious, does this extend to sounds? You talk about memorizing songs, but can you hear them in your head? How about touch or taste? For me, I definitely am on the hyperphantasia side of things. I can see things extremely clearly, with my eyes open, no need to close them (it might even be easier to imagine things when they are open haha). I also don't necessarily picture them clearly, I can do gradations between vague concept and extreme detail. I can play music in my head, I can smell things that are almost real. When you talk about picturing that apple, I can also imagine eating it, and the texture is so real. When I don't know what I want to eat, I will simulate eating different foods to see if they are something I am in the mood for. I don't actually think in words. Either I think in pure concepts, or the words are spoken in my head, as in I am imagining myself or someone else actually saying them out loud. It makes text conversations quite nice, but I dislike when people text in ways that don't sound like speaking. I am also not the best spatially, but sometimes my ideas feel quite spatial in nature, like a physical model in my head that I am messing with. I think it can actually prevent me from writing. It makes me very perfectionistic. I get frustrated when the words I place on the page don't match what I imagine and feel, which is actually a great trait to have for persuasive writing, perfectly replicating an argument I understand in my head. Reading is amazing though, I get completely immersed and both the words on the page and whats around me disappears. I have a lot of ideas for stories, but for now they remain in my mind.

I usually describe the way I imagine/remember things as knowing the relationships between things. Like starting with a chair; well it has to be made of something, let's say wood; ok, then an object has a texture, so is it finished or unfinished and with what?, etc. Essentially my entire internal process is essentially writing descriptions in the most helpful and fun way I can, so actually writing a description is pretty natural and already only has the interesting parts and feelings/senses. Thinking in connections also works really well in story development because tracing those relationship threads can suddenly snap a web of story information into place, sometimes taking the plot or character to places you didn't expect.

Thank the algorithm! I was just talking to a philosopher about the experience of life with aphantasia - sent this to them immediately. Please share more if there are more words you have to say on the topic!

one thing I've read , years ago, when aphantasia was not even uses, was a person in a forum describing it like being able to logically understand an image without having to create it. for instance, I can't imagine a plant growing from a seed to a sapling , but I know immediately what you mean when you ask me to imagine it. I can't imagine the process on A B C D E steps, but I can describe all the steps if you ask me .