| Obviously there's a lot of variance as everyone's different, but here's a list of benefits at least some people with aphantasia report: * Being more in the moment. An example of this is being better at mindfulness, as well as simply not living in the past or worrying about the future as much. * Less prone to trauma. You've already mentioned this, but not remembering scenes with full sensory information appears to provide a level of protection in some people when it comes to traumatic memories that are otherwise relived and unable to be processed. * Being better at abstract thought. Lots of people's memory is largely a kind of first person chronological narrative, made up of scenes on a timeline. Some people with aphantasia report they remember in a far more abstract structural manner, not merely confined to the visual. This is obviously also somewhat of a double-edged sword when it comes to remembering say past events. * Thinking faster on your feet. Without the added visual element, it seems possible to be be more linguistically dexterous and witty because there's less delay between thought and words. I hasted to add this is all a generalisation, and more about a propensity to be better than you'd personally otherwise be at these things as opposed to a superpower. I don't think it's coincidental that in Francis Galton's original paper on this, he found people with aphantasia are disproportionately represented in what we'd now call STEM. I have an aphantasia and I'm a programmer, and I've personally found I'm much more able to reason about complex systems than average, and the way I think about them seems markedly different. |