Aphantasia

This is the 4th blog, and it's going to be a bit different than the last two blogs solely due to the fact that I learned something new this week about myself. The thing that I learned this week about myself is not something new to me but I believe it isn't common knowledge, I was not aware it actually has a term and is something that is recognized. As the title suggests it is about aphantasia which I shall try my best to explain in this page. 

As a child I was never creative and I thought this was normal whilst entering, the early teen years of my life as I developed skills with languages I could think of things faster, better and more efficiently. I believed that everyone thinks like I do; in fragments of words building sentences as the thought is developed. A few of my friends told me they visualize and think in images with videos playing in their minds if someone mentioned a thing they'd visualize it in retrospect without actually putting in efforts to imagine things. I had never been able to imagine things I thought visualizing was something rare for those that are gifted in general. 

I was a student who had multiple hobbies at the time being one of the hobbies was drawing, I had seen people draw things without a reference, I always needed a reference to copy an image of and nothing helped me to be able to draw by my own. The idea that people can visualize in their minds did make me believe that I would never be able to be creative enough and even with a lot of practice and information regarding how to train your brain to be more creative, it never worked out for me.

Recently I came across an article "The blind mind: No sensory visual imagery in aphantasia" whose authors R. Keogh and J. Pearson experiment with questionnaires from people with aphantasia (Self-claimed). I found out that it is a condition where the brain does not activate visual respondents while thinking. This was how I realized that a normal person would be able to imagine and visualize things and I was the one who had sensory impairment rather than them having abilities that are uncommon.

As a person who has aphantasia, I can tell that there are still studies that are lacking this region of the human brain, I believe that the human brain makes up for the visual sensory impairment. It surely has its pros as well as cons. I say this solely due to the fact that as I lack the visualizing, I am generally more critical and I have been told on multiple occasions that I over-analyze everything even though it just comes to me naturally.