I do, but I rarely remember them and they rarely seem to have any visual components. When I do remember them, I'm usually remembering an emotional reaction rather than a visual component. I *think* they do have some visual components, but because I don't remember much about them it's hard to assess. The ones I have most often (or at least those remember) are experiential, rather than visual if that makes sense. I'm experiencing motion or running or something but there's not really much visually going on.
Another point of possible relevance for team work: I find audio-only presentations absolutely deathly. Similarly, I find talking on the phone almost painful unless I can do something else at the same time. I doodle and take compulsive notes in meetings because sitting and listening to someone or something without anything to look at is almost mentally painful and I retain almost none of it. I suspect this is because I'm not able to do much visual work in my head to complement the audio piece. So I'm the classic example of someone who really needs to (actually) see and write and talk things out to really understand them. There could also be undiagnosed ADHD or something else at play, but the lack of mental images lines up with a lot of what I'm finding out about a/hypofantasia.
It's kind of hard to explain because I don't know how other people are doing it. For me they don't really take a "form" at all. It's words or mental concepts. Sometimes its what I think of as imaginary images. I can imagine what a house looks like, but it's not really an *image* of the house. It's like a conceptual mapping of the house, but it's not visual. It's mental. I can't do any internal mind-mapping or concept-mapping, which is why I rely so heavily on lists or writing mind maps out on paper. I don't see words in my head either. I didn't realize that kids in spelling bees often visualize the word in their head as an image. I have to remember the sequence of letters without any visual aid, which is why I often have to write out longer words to spell them correctly.
Thanks for the article. I have just discovered that I have aphantasia and I have come to realize why school was a Struggle for me. I also now have issues with guided meditation due to lack of visual so I feel my spiritual growth is slow moving as I cannot seem to relax as I’m always in my head in thought as I visualize in thought.
Thanks for sharing your experience with this, Raquel! There are some great meditation techniques like walking meditation or stone meditation (picking up a small stone with one hand while breathing in and putting it down with the other while breathing out) that might be better fits for our kinds of brains. Memorizing short chants or prayers and repeating those while focusing on each word is another option that doesn’t require visualization. I’d be happy to share some resources if you’d find them helpful.
The meditation struggle didn’t even occur to me until a friend mentioned it on Facebook but it’s so true. I also find talking on the phone almost unbearable unless I can walk or do something else. I suspect that’s connected.
Thank you for sharing this technique I will give it a try. I would absolutely love more resources as my daughter also has it and I’m wanting to help her navigate this world as well.
Really good. Lincoln 2nd Inaugural vibes as well: "do the right as God gives us to see the right."
One of the more significant divergences seems to be the way in which many are not thinking about disagreement and discourse at this level. The comment about realism is important; many people regard it as a kind of moral danger to see many disagreements as deriving from perception rather than from immorality as such
Yes, that's a great point too. I wonder if some of it (among religious believers at any rate) comes from genuine confusion between relativism and pluralism. I think some people see divergent perceptions as a capitulation to or justification for sin, but there's a reason the final judgment belongs to God. Humans are deeply morally and epistemologically limited.
This post resonates strongly, especially the connection you are making between internal difference and political identity. I have not seen this perspective framed in this way before, but I think you are absolutely right. There is a great deal here worth exploring.
As an artist, I often previsualize images and then try to bring that mental picture into the physical realm. It's one way of working. The result is almost always different than the mental picture, even in photography, where you begin with observation but end with a formal image that reinterprets it. There is a compelling parallel in the idea of the latent image, the one recorded on film or in binary but not yet visible. It exists, but it has not yet been processed. Imagine describing that picture verbally both as it exists latent and then after it is processed to where your eyes can see it. That space between knowing and seeing feels relevant to what you are describing. I called my substack "Latent Views" for this concept. I look forward to the next parts.
I love the latent views name! As a failed artist in college, I struggled a lot with not being able to pre-visualize things in my head at all. I would have been much more successful if, instead of comparing my method to others, I had just figured out what worked for me and done more work with models and still-life.
Looking forward to listening to that one! I assume you've read Nagel's famous essay? That's the concept I keep coming back to and it's helpful for so many things. I'll check out the podcast and loop back here.
Aphantasia isn't a "different operating system"—it's a different coordinate system for the same information space.
Visual thinkers navigate via Euclidean embedding: they place concepts in 2D/3D mental "scenes" where spatial proximity = conceptual similarity.
Aphantasics navigate via graph topology: they traverse conceptual relationships as edges and nodes without needing to project them into visual space.
This is why aphantasics excel at ontology design—they're not "translating" a visual model into logic. They're directly manipulating the underlying relational structure without the lossy compression of visual representation.
Here's the math: visual imagination is a dimensionality reduction (high-D concept space → 2D/3D image). Aphantasia skips the reduction and works in native high-dimensional space.
For Palantir's work (complex, multi-relational data), this is an advantage because the visual "shortcut" actually loses information that matters for system coherence.
You're not hiring "people who think in pure logic." You're hiring people who don't bottleneck cognition through visual cortex bandwidth limits.
Aphantasics aren't "conceptual" thinkers—they're topological thinkers. And topology is what you need when the problem space is too complex to fit in Euclidean imagination.
Palantir figured this out. Most companies are still filtering for "can you picture the solution?"
Wrong question. Right question: "Can you compute the structure?"
Lauren, I need to know, do you dream? This is an incredible insight for me to use with my non-visual learners on my team.
I do, but I rarely remember them and they rarely seem to have any visual components. When I do remember them, I'm usually remembering an emotional reaction rather than a visual component. I *think* they do have some visual components, but because I don't remember much about them it's hard to assess. The ones I have most often (or at least those remember) are experiential, rather than visual if that makes sense. I'm experiencing motion or running or something but there's not really much visually going on.
Another point of possible relevance for team work: I find audio-only presentations absolutely deathly. Similarly, I find talking on the phone almost painful unless I can do something else at the same time. I doodle and take compulsive notes in meetings because sitting and listening to someone or something without anything to look at is almost mentally painful and I retain almost none of it. I suspect this is because I'm not able to do much visual work in my head to complement the audio piece. So I'm the classic example of someone who really needs to (actually) see and write and talk things out to really understand them. There could also be undiagnosed ADHD or something else at play, but the lack of mental images lines up with a lot of what I'm finding out about a/hypofantasia.
“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.”
Just curious about what forms these concepts take: words?
It's kind of hard to explain because I don't know how other people are doing it. For me they don't really take a "form" at all. It's words or mental concepts. Sometimes its what I think of as imaginary images. I can imagine what a house looks like, but it's not really an *image* of the house. It's like a conceptual mapping of the house, but it's not visual. It's mental. I can't do any internal mind-mapping or concept-mapping, which is why I rely so heavily on lists or writing mind maps out on paper. I don't see words in my head either. I didn't realize that kids in spelling bees often visualize the word in their head as an image. I have to remember the sequence of letters without any visual aid, which is why I often have to write out longer words to spell them correctly.
So interesting! Thanks.
Thanks for the article. I have just discovered that I have aphantasia and I have come to realize why school was a Struggle for me. I also now have issues with guided meditation due to lack of visual so I feel my spiritual growth is slow moving as I cannot seem to relax as I’m always in my head in thought as I visualize in thought.
Thanks for sharing your experience with this, Raquel! There are some great meditation techniques like walking meditation or stone meditation (picking up a small stone with one hand while breathing in and putting it down with the other while breathing out) that might be better fits for our kinds of brains. Memorizing short chants or prayers and repeating those while focusing on each word is another option that doesn’t require visualization. I’d be happy to share some resources if you’d find them helpful.
The meditation struggle didn’t even occur to me until a friend mentioned it on Facebook but it’s so true. I also find talking on the phone almost unbearable unless I can walk or do something else. I suspect that’s connected.
Thank you for sharing this technique I will give it a try. I would absolutely love more resources as my daughter also has it and I’m wanting to help her navigate this world as well.
Really good. Lincoln 2nd Inaugural vibes as well: "do the right as God gives us to see the right."
One of the more significant divergences seems to be the way in which many are not thinking about disagreement and discourse at this level. The comment about realism is important; many people regard it as a kind of moral danger to see many disagreements as deriving from perception rather than from immorality as such
Yes, that's a great point too. I wonder if some of it (among religious believers at any rate) comes from genuine confusion between relativism and pluralism. I think some people see divergent perceptions as a capitulation to or justification for sin, but there's a reason the final judgment belongs to God. Humans are deeply morally and epistemologically limited.
This post resonates strongly, especially the connection you are making between internal difference and political identity. I have not seen this perspective framed in this way before, but I think you are absolutely right. There is a great deal here worth exploring.
As an artist, I often previsualize images and then try to bring that mental picture into the physical realm. It's one way of working. The result is almost always different than the mental picture, even in photography, where you begin with observation but end with a formal image that reinterprets it. There is a compelling parallel in the idea of the latent image, the one recorded on film or in binary but not yet visible. It exists, but it has not yet been processed. Imagine describing that picture verbally both as it exists latent and then after it is processed to where your eyes can see it. That space between knowing and seeing feels relevant to what you are describing. I called my substack "Latent Views" for this concept. I look forward to the next parts.
I love the latent views name! As a failed artist in college, I struggled a lot with not being able to pre-visualize things in my head at all. I would have been much more successful if, instead of comparing my method to others, I had just figured out what worked for me and done more work with models and still-life.
Lauren, you might like this episode of my podcast where I talk about the ambiguity in aphantasia. It could be we’re all just mainly talking about highly ambiguous inner experiences in different ways. I talked with someone who’s researched inner experience. https://behavior-podcast.com/aphantasia-inner-monologue-and-the-challenges-of-describing-inner-experience-with-russell-hurlburt/
Looking forward to listening to that one! I assume you've read Nagel's famous essay? That's the concept I keep coming back to and it's helpful for so many things. I'll check out the podcast and loop back here.
Aphantasia isn't a "different operating system"—it's a different coordinate system for the same information space.
Visual thinkers navigate via Euclidean embedding: they place concepts in 2D/3D mental "scenes" where spatial proximity = conceptual similarity.
Aphantasics navigate via graph topology: they traverse conceptual relationships as edges and nodes without needing to project them into visual space.
This is why aphantasics excel at ontology design—they're not "translating" a visual model into logic. They're directly manipulating the underlying relational structure without the lossy compression of visual representation.
Here's the math: visual imagination is a dimensionality reduction (high-D concept space → 2D/3D image). Aphantasia skips the reduction and works in native high-dimensional space.
For Palantir's work (complex, multi-relational data), this is an advantage because the visual "shortcut" actually loses information that matters for system coherence.
You're not hiring "people who think in pure logic." You're hiring people who don't bottleneck cognition through visual cortex bandwidth limits.
Aphantasics aren't "conceptual" thinkers—they're topological thinkers. And topology is what you need when the problem space is too complex to fit in Euclidean imagination.
Palantir figured this out. Most companies are still filtering for "can you picture the solution?"
Wrong question. Right question: "Can you compute the structure?"