Aphantasia and Other Stupid Human Tricks, Part I

Pluralism goes all the way down.

Photo by Taras Hrytsak on Unsplash

Quick note from Lauren: I’m experimenting a bit this week, breaking up longer posts into shorter multi-part posts to make it easier on the reader (it’s still not very short, I’m afraid). I’m a bit concerned about cluttering people’s inboxes, but I think the shorter posts will also be easier to follow. I’m (always) very aware of tradeoffs, so let me know what you think! Parts II and III will drop Thursday and Friday morning.

When You’re the Weirdo

I'm about five years late to this revelation, but a couple weeks ago I stumbled across an article about people who can't see images in their minds. Procrastinating as usual, I clicked through and—like many others before me—was completely confused in the wrong direction.

Wait, what? People actually see images in their minds? Like really, literally see them?

This sounded like some kind of witchcraft. I spent the next week interrogating my husband and kids, siblings and parents, diving deep into Reddit rabbit holes and taking every online quiz I could find.

The verdict? Turns out I’m the weirdo.

At first blush, I seemed to be completely aphantasiac, meaning someone who cannot produce mental images in his or her mind. I couldn’t even figure out what people meant by creating an image in their mind in the first place. Later I figured out I’m more likely hypofantasiac, meaning I can sort of produce what I think might be mental images but it takes a lot of effort and they’re very fleeting (more on this later in this series). I can sort of conjure something shadowy and fleeting with my eyes open, but nothing at all when they're closed. And I'm still not sure what I'm doing even counts as a "visual image"—it's more like sketching something nebulous in the back of my brain.

Either way, when people talked about "visualizing" or "picturing" things, I had always assumed they were speaking metaphorically.

Unavoidable Errors

Turns out, that's a common refrain from people with aphantasia. They can't really imagine what it's like to see images in their heads, so they unconsciously project their own understanding onto everyone else's experiences. People with aphantasia assume everyone else is thinking in concepts and not images because that’s the only way to think we’re familiar with.

Our totally reasonable belief about what other people are experiencing is, in fact, 100% wrong. And many of us who can’t form mental images don't even know it because it never occurs to us that our "normal" isn't actually normal at all and there’s no reason for us to question it.

It's an error of understanding, but not because we're not trying, or because we don't care about other people, or because we're asking the wrong questions. It's an error because our experiences are so fundamentally different from those of other people that it doesn't even occur to anyone in either group that there's any divergence at all.

This particular kind of error turns out to be really important for politics, and for radical moderation specifically. Not aphantasia itself, but what it reveals about human brains, human experiences, and how both interact with our shared social and political world.

The Humility Check

The first lesson is the most obvious: we often don't know what we don't know about other people's inner lives. Thomas Nagel famously asked "What is it like to be a bat?" The aphantasia discovery is like a gentler version of that question: What is it like to be someone whose brain works completely differently from my own?

For years, I assumed everyone else was like me. When they said "picture this," I thought they meant "think about this abstractly." When they described "visualizing success," I figured they meant conceptualizing goals. I was wrong about something as basic as how other people's minds work, despite spending four plus decades thinking we were talking about the same thing.

If we can be this wrong about something so fundamental, what else could we all be wrong about?

Turns out, it’s a lot.

And it’s not just cognitive or neurodiversity, of course. We actually spend an enormous amount of time and energy every day engaged in navigating pluralism in cultural norms, religious values, communication differences, geographic experiences, and even mood. Often, we likely don’t even know that pluralism exists, which can lead to some weird and funny but sometimes even tragic misunderstandings.

On the weird and funny end, my friend James Stacey Taylor tells a hilarious story of moving from the UK to the US and encountering raccoons for the first time. He had - mistakenly, it turned out - assumed for many years that raccoons and chipmunks were the same size. When confronted with actual raccoons in real life, he was deeply concerned by these enormous and potentially dangerous animals. Something was clearly very wrong with these mutant raccoons. He dutifully called the police, believing (correctly, in one sense) that he was acting responsibly based on the information he had. But it turns out the information he had was hilariously wrong.

Political Humility

James uses that story in an article about healthcare (open access here) to illustrate some of the many complexities about autonomy and informed consent.

But as we know, diverse perspectives and mistakes in understanding affect all aspects of human life, from education to criminal justice to healthcare to politics.

What political positions do I hold based on mistaken assumptions about how other people think, feel, or experience the world?

The reality that parts of our shared world remain fundamentally unshared has important impacts on policy: the people who vote or make policies often don’t share crucial parts of the same world as those the policies will impact.

I didn’t understand the bureaucratic alienation of the modern welfare state until I was asked to buy baby formula for someone with a WIC card. And I didn’t understand how terribly the U.S. maternity care system sucked until I had my first kid.

It’s a mistake to think that if we’re just smarter or communicate better or try harder we’ll eliminate diverse perspectives. While James’ belief about the size of raccoons was an error that could be adjusted by other people’s insights (but only by a chance encounter with our charming trash pandas in the flesh), many divergences of values or beliefs or experiences are impossible or at least very difficult to eradicate. Especially when they - like my beliefs about other people’s brains or James’ beliefs about the size of raccoons - go unchallenged because there’s no reason for them to be challenged at all.

This isn't relativism—it's realism. And it's a critical component of radical moderation: the recognition that human diversity runs deeper than we typically imagine, and that this diversity has real implications for how we think about living together.

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Tomorrow’s post: I'll dig into what aphantasia reveals about the limits of empathy and perspective-taking, and why this matters for political disagreement.

Your Turn

Have you had a revelation akin to mental images or giant raccoons that unearthed a gulf you din’t realize existed ? Did it change anything about how you move through the world or engage with other people? I'd love to hear your "wait, they what?" moments in the comments below. And of course (as always) if you like what you read, please share widely and subscribe (if you haven’t already).