People with aphantasia, how does it affect your book reading?
How does it affect your ability to enjoy books? Or type of books you'd enjoy?
Do you tend to prefer more visual medium like video(movies, tv), or comic books?
102
Comments69View original on programming.dev
I hate descriptions, and I have a really hard time when there's more than a paragraph focusing on descriptions of what things look like.
Other than that it's fine, though I sometimes have to trace back because I often skip parts that look description-y and some authors like to slip in some piece of crucial information.
I don't actively hate descriptions, but I used to just skim them. Now I sometimes slow down for descriptions if I think they might bring additional meaning or context. But then sometimes when it gets to be too much work, I'll go back to just skipping over them again lol
Ugh, me too! I kinda hate when that happens
I don't have aphantasia but I still skip over descriptions. It just doesn't really add anything for me. Much more interested in dialogue and actions
Does it not bother you that you don't catch what things look like as you read? If you're skipping description, of say, a lake, do you just... Assume it looks like a lake you've seen in the past? What if the description plays heavy into the plot, like the water is, idk, yellow and boiling. That doesn't matter to you?
I scan over the descriptions to check for irregularities or significant identifiers. So your yellow lake would be noteworthy to me or if a person is described with long hair. I don't mentally imagine a long hair person, but I try to remember it, so if later somebody sees a long haired person in the distance I know which character is referenced.
And yes if I don't recognise anything noteworthy, I don't make a mental note, it's just a normal lake, nothing important to remember.
But that isn't always working out for me. In Neverwhere the Marquis de Carabas is described as being pitch black. Which I fully didn't get and so was wondering why all the fan art made him so black that you can't recognise features. Because that was how he was described and I missed that important fact.
I mean, it does bother me, but there's nothing I can do about it.
I don't assume it looks like anything, I simply know there's a lake, I have no idea (nor do I care much) what it looks like. I can't imagine what a lake I've seen in the past looks like.
If the water is yellow and boiling, I'll remember it because I know water in a lake usually isn't yellow and boiling, I just don't have any visual aide for that.
It's kinda hard to explain, if you show me a picture with a yellow lake, I know it's wrong because I've seen lakes, but if you ask me to describe one, it's gonna be really hard for me and you won't get many details.
If it turns out any of the visual things was important, I'll simply read it again and mechanically remember the details, but mechanical memory is kinda limited in what it can hold, so I avoid that unless I find out that it's worth remembering.
This is me too. I will read descriptions, but don't pay as much attention. Sometimes, if after the description, there is a que that a description had something important in it, I will have to go back over a description to check what I missed.
I've always been a huge reader, and a fast one. Í wonder if visualizing what you read slows people down.
I also have trouble recognizing faces (mild/moderate prosopagnosia), and it's easier to recognize a name in a book than a face in a movie.
Not really, I can read very fast too and also visualize it at the same time, like full blown movie. I think it's more indicative of information processing abilities in general: I can generally keep up watching lectures at 3x speed and notice things on screen almost instantly too.
I'm super efficient at filtering information too: I'll look at a paragraph in some documentation and immediately see "If you're in X special case, then..." at the 5th sentence in the middle of the paragraph when skimming through documentation. Or of course skipping details I don't care about.
I have exactly this problem. It's also very difficult when watching a movie adaptation of a book I've read, to associate the character from the book with the actor in the movie. When I read, they're just a name.
Same.
Yes, especially when the author probably got their inspiration during an LSD trip.
For those of us who don’t know what it means: “is the inability to voluntarily visualize mental images”
Basically if someone said “think of a nice round juicy red apple” people with the condition wouldn’t be able to imagine it in their mind.
I'm in my 40s and learned about this just a few years ago. Never affected my reading of different genres. I guess I didn't know any different! It did help me understand why I don't have the great memories of childhood things like my close-in-age sister does. I have always relied on her for details.
I know what the condition is but the condition is still fascinating to me.
I hadn't followed this when apparently it became a topic of interest on Reddit.
Apparently people sit on a spectrum, where they can envision less color and detail, where people with aphantasia cannot envision anything.
Also, interestingly-enough, this is apparently not tied to the ability to envision things in dreams.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/g69hc0/dreams_in_color/
That's fascinating. I can envision things voluntarily, if perhaps not as vividly as in real life---it's not on par with looking at a fully-detailed scene, but I can certainly do color. On the other hand, my dreams have always been on the border with being unable to visualize at all. Maybe there's a hint of color, but everything is normally desaturated, and things are transient and vague.
Huh.
Yep, can confirm, can't imagine anything, but my dreams work well. They're usually not very clear, but a few times I had trouble distinguishing dreams from real life.
I do "see" inner images but they're blurry, flashing and I can't directly control them. So when I read I mostly focus on the text and faintly in the background there's a "school fight recorded by hyperactive kid" version of the plot going on.
This is probably the most relatable one I've seen so far
Another great analogy are those comically quick cuts in Bollywood dramas where they mix slo-mo, sped up shots, random super closeups, the same shot over and over and whatever else until you can barely make out what's even going on
Both of your descriptions match closely with how I internally visualize. Never bothers me until I try hard to follow a visual description
Does your sense of direction also suck? Because it really does for me and I've always suspected a connection. I still get lost in my hometown from time to time despite living there for 9 years now.
My sense of direction is usually pretty good. If I'm distracted I'll get turned around fairly easily but it's not hard for me to figure out where I accidentally went.
May be the wrong thread for this, but isn't it really common for people to not even know that have aphantasia?
I'm imagining the whole community from The Giver, where people didn't know that they
::: spoiler This book's so old I don't know if it's worth spoiler-warning for Couldn't see colors :::
and they didn't even realize.
It wasn't officially discovered until 2005. A doctor(Adam Zeman) had a patient who lost their visual imagination and wrote a paper about it. It turns out that aphants are overrepresented in the medical and engineering communities, so a bunch of doctors wrote back, having just realized that a lack of visualization is not normal. Then, he finally published a paper on it in 2015.
That's a great reference.
Yep, I always thought "imagining" something was really just an euphemism for thinking about it.
I didn't realize I had it until well into adulthood and I've always enjoyed reading. Even the extensive description still has meaning I just don't see it.
"I can't read books that are realistic fiction. I can't do anything that's got like crazy world building because I can't perceive it and I have a hard time." -my sister
I don't have it personally, but we both have tism and so here's a talk we had while driving.
me: *takes wrong turn*
sister: "when I need to know my left and rights and cant do the hand thing, I remember 'never eat soggy waffles' because I can remember East is Right and Left is West."
me: "wh.. what?? why? why can't you just do the right and left in your head?"
sister: "girl how"
me: "I just imagine it?"
sister: "MUST BE NICE,, HUH?!"
if someone wants I can ask her in more detail later, she's busy with something rn
Dated a girl for a while that had corresponding R & L tattooed on the topside base of her thumbs.
That way when she was driving and people said go left, go right, she wouldn’t have to ask which way that was.
When I was with her I’d have to say things like the turn is on your side, take a my side.
It was different.
I taught children's martial arts for a long time, and the best way to teach the younger ones is to face them and do the thing on the opposite side. I had to, for many years say stuff like: "step out with your RIGHT foot" while simultaneously stepping with my left,
Let me tell you, the number of wrong turns I take when someone is giving directions is so embarrassing. I have to really concentrate and like... feel which hand is my right hand.
That’s so funny. You conditioned yourself haha but it makes complete sense why it happened
my grandma once said if I get one of those tattoos I would never get a job and live in a cardboard box because nobody would hire someone who can't know their rights and lefts 🥀
She also said I'm infected by the devil because I love my gay dad
she also hasn't even gone to church in 4 years because the pastor told her to not be racist.
Your grandma had a lot to say.
Those three points are a lot to unpack.
Well she was the first time I’d encountered that personally. While it was different and directions-wise I had to train myself how to convey meaning, you’ll be pleased to know I never gave her shit for it.
Funny thing I recently discovered, aphantasia has many traits in common with autism, which is kinda fascinating.
For the longest time I thought I have some weird form of autism because way too many things fit the description, but some of the crucial details didn't fit me.
Then I discovered that research and suddenly I knew why.
I have aphantasia but love reading, even really descriptive passages. I don’t ‘see’ but I “feel” words, I think, if that makes any sense. Like, if I read a description of a steaming mug of coffee, I’ll feel the rising steam on my face, feel how it smells, feel the heaviness of the mug in my hand, etc. It’s a lot more vivid in a way than when I watch tv since that’s all visual and auditory.
You're asking the wrong question. How do you guys without aphantasia manage to read when there's pictures whizzing around your head all the time??
Mechanically, whenever I read about someone's or someplace's introduction and it describes their appearance, I'll just skip that section. If it's more than a sentence-long description I'll often unconsciously just move on to the next paragraph - it's literally meaningless to me.
I read a lot when I'm not stressed. This week, I've read the whole of the Robots series by Isaac Asimov (four books, around 1500 pages total). Several times, I've read entire books in one sitting without even moving.
I can't really tell you if it affects my ability to enjoy books, because I don't know how I'm "supposed" to enjoy a book. So instead I'll just talk about why I like to read.
::: spoiler Robots and Empire spoiler When Daniel and Giskard decide to be friends and shake hands, symbolically becoming people rather than just machines, made me cry. It's so meaningful. :::
World-building This is something that I think Alastair Reynolds is really good at. He writes science fiction books that are grounded in reality, and being able to see what he imagines. Another good example is old science fiction where there's the dichotomy between humanity having conquered space thousands of years ago and yet the cutting edge of technology developed a few years ago is recieving the news on a paper ticker tape! Seeing what what the authors imagined vs things we take for granted today but was so advanced it never even occurred to them, like the Internet.
Mystery / plot There's a certain beauty to seeing the web that's been built up over the course of a story all coming together at the end. A good example would be Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time where all the threads come together and the resolution at the end wasn't what I expected but, in hindsight, nothing else would have done it justice.
Character growth Gravity Dreams by LE Modesitt is my favourite book and I don't know why. I think it's just that the journey the main character goes through really speaks to me and gets me thinking about my own philosophy and life.
In summary, I'll say that you don't have to see something to comprehend what is happening and to be touched emotionally. As for your other question, I also watch film and TV but I definitely prefer animated over live. I can get easily confused between different actors which doesn't happen with animation for me. I find that TV or film takes less effort to enjoy, but also that I don't enjoy it as much as a book.
For me, the book and my surroundings completely disappear, the whole thing turns into a dream-like movie experience. I don't see letters or words at all, it becomes an unconscious process that keeps feeding the dream and it looks similar to fuzzy AI videos.
Sometimes the process of getting pulled out into reality again can be brutal: suddenly it's 3h later and I have to look around and take a moment to settle back. If you dream while you sleep, it's like when you suddenly wake up while you were in an intense dream, takes a moment to process. I'm really completely gone in another world the whole time.
That's what I've heard other people say, and it just sounds insane. You're in a world of fantasy literally seeing things that aren't there and somehow that's normal behaviour. Crazy!
But I guess it seems weird to you how I can do anything without seeing things. I've had someone online get very angry with me for saying I have no visual imagination, because how can I even read and recognise letters if I can't see them in my head?
Humans are very weird sometimes! It's nice that there are so many different ways to exist :)
I think I'm kind of on the other extreme, I day dream a lot. It's like I can experience anything I've experienced before on demand and replay it. Sometimes it's annoying, it's like someone left 3 TVs and 2 radios on in my head and I can't turn it off.
I didn't know that was a thing until today, but also totally unsurprised, the brain is super weird.
I don't struggle to picture it though, that only works for me if the book is interesting. When it's boring (ie. forced to read it and there's a test), I think my brain falls back to how you read books.
You both seem nuts to me. I can conceptually imagine, but obviously cannot see things in my head because I'm not schizo, my surroundings don't disappear but it doesn't mean I don't appreciate descriptions and conjure concepts from them, just not imagery.
I think all this aphantasia stuff is just trappings of the English language and having "imagine" have the word "image" as a root, which is wrong, because imagination is more about concepts, it's a unique data structure that's not related to jpegs or photons and doesn't involve them. But some people conflate the two because their language doesn't allow them to think otherwise so they assume concepts are literal images in their head, and others with enough self-awareness to know they don't actually "see" anything in their head assume they have an issue/divergence. It's so bizarre to watch.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news but if you can't relate to mental images existing in a visual sense you probably have some degree of aphantasia.
Some research indicates that it may be a spectrum from complete lack of imagery to full five-sense detail, which might be why it's hard to relate to either extreme. At any rate most people fall in the category of seeing an image, to the point that hyperphantasia is even more common than aphantasia.
I have it*, but not as severe as others. Imagining an apple starts as a very abstract concept, I can't visualize it without concentrated effort. Other people might be able go on to describe the stem, the leaves, the shade of red, the glossy wax exterior, etc... I can't automatically build to any of that, even if I subconsciously default to a red apple the "image" may just as well be green.
*edit: checked the vviq test and discovered the label is hypophantasic
I'm not going along with this tiktok diagnosis shit when the way I see it I have extremely fundamental problems with the plausibility of the entire concept.
That sounds pretty wild.
Mildly aphantastic.
Love reading, don't know or have any different experience to compare it to.
I don't visualise, but feel words and concepts as worda/concepts. I like descriptions as I can build up a concept with the words.
This. I also have it to a certain degree. Perfect description of how I read books. Never bothered me. Never even realized some people have a vivid visual imagination until it became a recurring reddit topic a few years ago.
999 was the realisation it was a thing for me, and then found a diagnostic questionnaire online and got the "mild aphantastia" result.
Similar experience here. Aphantastic and prefer books to shows/movies.
Quoting my partner that has it: "Comic books are cool for that. I love books. I tend to gloss over heavy descriptions of place settings, I don't spend a lot of time trying to picture it so I prefer books with dialogue. Watching a show before reading the books does help though. (Like we did with The Expanse.)"
They also mentioned that Red Rising action scenes are ridiculously descriptive and they typically skim those sections to find out who hits whom.
Not total aphantasia, but mostly. I'd describe it as almost cartoonish, but more in the sense of the non-visual concept I associate with the image being described as being heavily exaggerated, more than any visual intensity. I get maybe brief glimpses of visualization before it dissolves into concept.
I know what the scene described looks like, and I know the associated elements well enough to be familiar with their properties and possible relevance to the story. As far as descriptions serve the telling of the story, I don't really think I'm missing out on much.
For visual media I tend to prefer animation and comic books, though I think that's unrelated to aphantasia, I'm probably a tad autistic. I appreciate every frame being intentional, and always get caught in a loop of uncertainty with live action; was that expression intentional or is the actor just hammy?
Not sure that I can really compare it to how I would be without aphantasia since, of course, it is all I have ever known, but I do stll enjoy reading. Like other people are saying, I don't tend to concern myself with visual descriptions
This carries over to my TTRPG gameplay. I rarely ever actually describe what anyone looks like beyond the absolutely vaguest of descriptions (i.e. a heavily-built man, getting on years), which I didn't notice until a player pointed it out to me. I mostly go by mannerisms, which I suppose is an aspect of appearance
I am still quite good at building mental maps of locations and can do all the classic "rotate a shape" kind of stuff. I can't visualise it, but I can figure it out. I guess I'm mentally storing it in another format. Possibly related to that, one of the few types of illustration I do particularly enjoy getting in a book is a map
My dad has aphantasia and he describes something similar, but it doesn't make sense to me when he says it either. When i ask how he knows how to get somewhere he says he "thinks in vectors". But i don't understand how that's different than visualizing
To me it seems like the difference between having a written description of something vs an image of it. I can describe to you a square, 10 centimetres on each side, drawn with black ink in the centre of a sheet of white A4 printer paper. I could also show you a photo of that square. In both cases the information is conveyed, but only one of them involved an image
When I'm navigating I basically always do it by landmarks and turns, which is probably not unusual. I can use relationships of "this street goes west until it meets that street" without having to picture a map. The shape and length of that street don't really matter for the sake of getting somewhere, only what it connects to
Yknow somehow I had a great time reading. Written word is the most reliable way to stabilize visuals in my mind, which is why I've taken to writing as a creative outlet as well.
Its been so long since I've genuinely read anything but I think thats the closest I ever got to actually visualizing something. Described well enough and my mind can really conjure up an image for once.
Its why I tend to like slow and detailed scenes. I can spend a lot of time writing a scene that only lasts eight minutes
I prefer books that don't waste too many sentences describing things that have no relevance, but I can still enjoy a good story.
A great deal, I'd
imagine.I can conceptualize.I have Total Aphantasia, and zero sense memory at all. I do have an "inner monologue" of sorts. I can't "hear" it in my head, but I understand all the same. I don't know how to explain with words and I don't know how I work either, really. My outer and inner voice are the same thing to me and I have full control over it., often transitioning back and forth when I'm alone. As in, no racing thoughts. One of the ideas behind meditation where you try to silence your mind? I don't have to try. It's not something that takes effort for me. I bring this up because this is how I'm reading books, with that silent inner voice. One of my friends is like me with Total Aphantasia, but he has no inner monologue either. Which is bonkers to me. I don't get it, neither does he! Haha. Many different kinds of human minds out there, it's not so simple.
Hard to miss what I've never experienced, I still enjoy thinking about these fictional worlds even if I can't conjure up a representation of what is written in my mind.
I read every genre. It's actually specific writing styles I lean towards. If the author is really detailed with describing environment constantly, I appreciate that. I can't really "fill in the blanks" so to speak. I also really like it heavy on the internal monologue side of things with main characters. I think that's why I liked Ender's Game so much when I was a kid.
I do prefer any visual media. I save all my book and research reading for when I'm at work these days, which is a lot of time actually. One of them hurry up and wait jobs. Books are far better when it comes to potentially constant interruptions.
Kinda echoing other comments in here, to say that lengthy segments where the author is describing the appearance of something can be rather annoying to me. I can't see it. No matter how many flowery words you use, I can't see it. I know what it is that you're describing, I already got a good-enough understanding with the first few sentences. But I can't see it. Please, please just move on to the actual story.
I really wanted to get into Stephen King's Dark Tower series. I made it to the point in the first book where two characters spend an extended amount of time in a pitch black tunnel. Oh. My. Fucking. God. I can only take so many pages of "Boy it sure is dark in here" before I lose my patience. I've started that book at least 5 times, and could never manage to make it past that section because it's just so infuriating to read. It's almost like the book is mocking me, as if to say "Hah hah, get a load of this goober, can't even see the darkness!"
I don't blame authors for this, though. It's not their responsibility to cater their art to my neurodivergence. It's just a minor frustration I've learned to live with. But it's also part of the reason why I don't read much for leisure. I think this is why I'm generally more tolerant of films that aren't as good as the books they're adapted from, because the alternative is that I'll likely otherwise never experience the story at all, so I'll take what I can get.
I recommend sticking to it, the first book is generally boring, but some of the latter ones are pretty great (until they get very weird again).
I really enjoy reading, but I can't picture a scene, or what characters look like. It can be a bit confusing at times, but doesn't usually take away from the enjoyment.
As an example, my favourite sci fi author Randolph Lalonde (great independent author, buy his books 👍) had a scene in a recent book where some characters had a shootout in a warehouse that held several spaceships. The ships were all at least a few metres long, so the warehouse was huge. In my head, everything was centred on a small area around the characters, and I could sort of picture them being within a few feet of each other.
I couldn't picture any details, it was as if he had written that 'the man stood near the woman, and pointed the gun towards the crates', even though the scene was well written with good descriptions. My brain couldn't translate the description into a layout in my head.
I still really enjoyed the scene, but every now and then it was as if my brain realised that things should be further apart, or one character should be taller than another, for example.
Details in books and written media as a list, not a series of images. Loved reading as a kid, dropped off when I spent more time doing other things, like cpmouter gaming.
The upside is that witthout a mental picture of characters any close enough visual take on the character will work for me. I also have ADHD so small details are likely forgotten and only the prominent ones that the character is defined by are going to be weird if mkssed.
For example when I heard Idris Elba was going to be cast as Roland in The Dark Tower it was a big positive because he seemed like someone that would be able to oull off the personality of the character and I was only concerned about whether they would do a good job with the missing fingers or drop it entirely as missing fingers was a big part of Roland's character for me. Yeah I know there was something involving race in the books, but that plotline was something that didn't seem to be necessary to carry over into a movie.
Of course the movie ended up being a pile of trash, but is a good example of how I focus more on how the character acts than how they look.
Same with a lot of science, swords, and other objects where I really don't have a mental image so a lot of sets work as long as they have the things or the general feel.
It was different for me, King mentioned his blue eyes so many times that I couldn't imagine Idris as playing him.
Didn’t have it for most of my life, but briefly had it, along with some memory issues. It made understanding what I was reading nigh on impossible. Any lengthy descriptions fell through my memory near instantly, as I had no practice in maintaining a purely conceptual memory of a piece of writing. On reflection, I’m terribly impressed with those who manage to deal with the absence of an audiovisual imagination to compress information.
I don't have aphantasia and I don't particularly fancy any medium over the other, but what I often miss is sound. Music is a whole different language to either visual or conceptual as conveyed by words, whereas imagery to me feels the most direct and laziest, music can convey feelings there are neither words nor imagery for, and so often I like adaptations of written works for injecting some fitting music, and will listen to fitting music as I read books.
When you say you miss sound, you mean while reading? I wonder if there are books that get deep with sound description. I can think of a couple that might, but they of course do not have actual sound.
Yes, while reading. I miss music to be specific, so this applies to comic books, manga etc.
A good soundtrack to me is everything in terms of tone and atmosphere and mood.
Less subjectively, it makes sense, since you can't touch or smell the world inside a book or a game or a film or whatever, the remaining types of information are auditory and visual, so 50% of the information about a thing is aural, so games, movies, shows etc. get that as a leg up on books etc.
On the other hand a lack of music does often force my brain to make some up which gets my lazy ass to go nurture that hobby and produce some sounds so I'm not complaining!
Have you heard of Diane Ackerman? She has a book, A Natural History of the Senses, that gets deep into human connection to these things.
Completely. Books are only good to me if the author has a nice writing style. Those character descriptions or scene description paragraphs? I just skip them. They don't do anything for me.
On the other hand, I LOVE movies.
Itt, people that can visualise but think that not constantly visualising everything they read means they have the superpower to "feel words as concepts"