Aphantasia and Stupid Human Tricks, Part II
The Limits of Empathy and the Reality of Social Pressure
This is Part 2 of my aphantasia series. If you missed Part 1, you can catch up here.
Yesterday I argued that the existence of aphantasia and other kinds of neurodiversity have important corollaries in the political space, particularly with regard to political humility. Here I’ll expand on that with a couple more thoughts on how both our apartness and togetherness create challenges for political life.
These challenges aren’t insurmountable (thank goodness), but they do require us to foster collaborative and thoughtful political realism, one that recognizes that the work of shared political life doesn’t have an end.
The Limits of Perspective-Shifting
Sometime after I gave birth to our first daughter, my husband asked me what contractions felt like. I tried - and failed - to figure out a way to describe a peculiar kind of productive pain in an organ he doesn’t possess. The best I could do was something like “it’s like a full-abdomen charley horse accompanied by waves of hormones and weird euphoria.” I actually think there could be something in common with how people feel in ultra-marathons, but I’m really just guessing. Just like I’m guessing about what other people see in their heads when someone asks them to visualize a horse.
Adam Smith built his moral philosophy in the Theory of Moral Sentiments around the idea that we should practice putting ourselves in other people's shoes, which develops sympathy. This practice is foundational to empathy, to moral reasoning, to democratic discourse. It’s essential, really, to almost everything in our shared social lives.
But aphantasia and other examples of baked-in human diversity remind us that perspective-taking has limits. People with aphantasia can maybe sort of imagine what it's like to see pictures in their heads. Similarly, people with typical visualization might (or might not!) have a harder time imagining what it's like to think entirely in concepts and words and feelings. Or, if either group do think they can imagine what it's like they'll never know for sure if their imagination actually matches what other people see.
Perhaps even more problematic, they certainly don't know they should even try if it's never occurred to them that diversity in this area exists in the first place.
It's a gulf of experience that we can't really bridge if we don’t know the gulf is there at all, which is what makes the aphantasia phenomenon itself so mind-blowing. Humans have lived together for tens of thousands of years and we just figured out five years ago that some people have an internal visual mental life that’s completely different from others.
In an important sense, all humans are strangers to each other in important ways. There are things I cannot know and will never know about my husband’s internal world, despite living next to him for 16 years. Despite growing my children in my own body, their internal experience is nevertheless their own, and how they grapple with, internalize, and process their life experiences will always be something I cannot fully access or understand.
While perspective-shifting, putting yourself in another person’s shoes, and practicing empathy are all important skills for democratic citizens to practice, they’re inherently limited by the realities of human life.
Accidental Gaslighting and Social Pressure
But just when you thought I was going to end with the futility of shared experiences, I’m going to boomerang us back in the other direction.
Between a lot of Googling and Redditing about aphantasia I also spent some time poking and prodding my husband about what he sees when he visualizes something. We had been talking for about an hour about mental imagery one evening when he stopped and then said uncertainly, "Well, I thought I was seeing images, but now I'm not so sure."
I certainly didn’t mean to gaslight my husband as part of my aphantasia quest, but it turns out it’s easy to do.
Humans are fundamentally social creatures. Our very brains develop in a social soup that affects everything from language acquisition to moral development to the size and shape of various brain structures. Our social environment, particularly when we’re young, shapes how we think and move through the world. Social belonging is so fundamental to who we are that it's easy to be swayed by other people's perceptions or beliefs—sometimes to the point of questioning our own direct experience. We’re often primed to do it.
Despite our strangeness to each other, we desperately want to connect. And this desire to connect, highlighted by Smith, can lead us to other kinds of misunderstandings.
Radical moderation's focus on what I call social individualism reminds us how susceptible we all are to social influence, groupthink, and tribal pressure. As Robert Talisse points out in his book Civic Solitude, democratic life requires spaces where we can think through our own values and positions without constantly reacting to others. Without that kind of reflective solitude, we risk getting swept away by mob mentality or being manipulated by the most convincing demagogue. Alone time isn't a cure for social contagion, but it helps.
If a single conversation had my husband calling into question his experience of his own mind, how much more vulnerable are our political beliefs, moral intuitions, and social attitudes, which we necessarily co-create with other people on a daily basis?
Ultimately, we need both solitude and engagement, while recognizing the inadequacy and dangers of both. The political project is an incomplete one in every sense of the word.
Strangers to Ourselves
And then, of course, we know that human experiences change within a lifetime because their brains literally change over a lifetime. My brain has been fundamentally changed by motherhood in a way that I could not have really imagined before I went through it. I’m now - literally - a chimera, colonized with fetal cells that have likely made it all the way to my brain. But even more than that, my brain likely changed shape and function during pregnancy, with a reduction in gray matter, an increase in white matter, alongside a wash of hormones that left me a profoundly different person in a number of ways.
There are less happy examples of this too, of course. In grad school we learned about the case of a man with no history of sexual abnormality who suddenly began collecting child pornography and even, horrifyingly, began sexually grooming his young stepdaughter. His wife left him and his life was in tatters. Shortly before his trial, he went to the hospital with a headache where doctor’s discovered an egg-size brain tumor, which, once removed, completely eradicated the bizarre behavior. When the behavior emerged again later, doctors found that the tumor had also returned.
I think about that guy often, because while feeling empathy for a pedophile is foreign and perhaps even revolting to most people, I can in fact imagine what it would be like to do things you don’t want to do and want to stop doing but cannot. I can trace my own struggles with mood disorders after the births of each of my kids to a weird space where that guy’s experience and my own meet, however fleetingly.
We’ve both shared, in different ways, of course, the reality of having a brain that is both a stranger and even an enemy. And we both, likely, remember what our brains were like before. We’ve both experienced the weird fragmentation of having lived as two different people.
Charting a Path Through Deep Pluralism
Despite these profound gaps in understanding—between aphantasics and visualizers, between people who've experienced childbirth and those who haven't, between the person I was before motherhood changed my brain and who I am now—we are not condemned to isolation.
The radical moderate response isn't to give up on empathy or perspective-taking, but to hold our understanding lightly. To stay curious rather than certain. To ask more questions and make fewer assumptions about what's happening in other people's heads. This requires embracing a particular kind of tension: the moving back and forth between different worlds that are nevertheless the same world, like looking through a kaleidoscope where the same pieces create entirely different patterns.
Most importantly, it means recognizing that even if we are destined to remain mysteries to each other (and ourselves), we can still navigate a path forward together. It will be messy, full of misunderstandings and contradictions, and will always be a work in progress. But that's not a bug in the system of shared political life—it's a feature. The ongoing project of building a world that works for minds as different as ours requires exactly a patient, humble, and endlessly curious approach.
Tomorrow’s post will lay out what some of that path might look like.
Friday: I'll explore how we build institutions that work for a (deeply) pluralistic world.
Your Turn
Have you experienced any (or all) of these things? Can you think of an experience you've had that you genuinely believe others can't fully understand? When has someone's attempt to "understand where you're coming from" felt particularly off-base? What made it miss the mark? Have you ever realized you were completely wrong about what someone else was experiencing internally? What tipped you off? I’d love to hear more of your experiences in the comments!
And of course (as always) if you like what you read, please share widely and subscribe (if you haven’t already).
Social psych has so much to say on the subject of perspective taking. But one of my favorite findings is that when you take the perspective of another person, you actually start to see both yourself and the other person as more similar. It's called trait transfer and it's a mix of seeing their traits in yourself and your traits in them.
I will also cosign the part about motherhood changing your brain in unexepcted ways. I feel like it activated a primal, protective part of me that I didn't know about before. I now think mothers are dangerous creatures, but luckily for all of us tend toward peace :)
I feel like this series is capturing a line of thought I’ve been following most of my life. It started with the early realization that to know what it’s like to be someone else logically necessitates forgetting what it’s like to be “me” and thus losing the frame of reference. Most recently it’s been stepping away from academia in part because teaching economics as a neurodivergent person from the 1900’s feels like trying to explain color theory to the color blind—valuable, but only possible if the students are ready and able to listen.