[ryanjshaw]

> So I happen to know how it is to live both with and without the ability to visualize

True, but this is not the same as being born aphantasic.

I'm thinking that people like me who have never had the ability to draw pictures in their head have decades of dedicating brain power to alternative ways of thinking about the world that you wouldn't have in place.

You wouldn't be able to compare the experience in any real depth, but you might have more than typical insight.

[markers]

I fully agree, especially since it hasn't been that long since I got it. I notice my brain is thinking a bit differently already, but my memory is extremely wired to thinking visually, so I'm for sure impaired compared to someone born with aphantasia. A friend of mine who has aphantasia is much better than me on remembering facts and thinking logically for instance.

Reading reddit etc, there are so many people getting very distraught and worse when they discover they have aphantasia (and reddit, for many people, is a magnifier for such thoughts unfortunately). Having been very good at that ability and then lost it I can provide some perspective on that. I would be lying if I didn't admit it's a very nice ability to have, but I also wouldn't really bother spending much energy on considering how life would be if one had it, but rather as you and the article points out, focus on the strengths one builds without it.

[ryanjshaw]

Not sure why I was downvoted (I know it wasn't you), but it sounds like we are on the same page.

It's important because in my case I think quite differently from how it seems most people do: I have a sort of "conceptual graph" that I sense my way around. When people discuss stuff, I update that graph. Often this causes issues in personal relationships, but in other ways it's helpful.

I tend to detect incompatible information more often than others, I believe, as a result of this (but I'm still human and miss stuff/make mistakes). It makes me very good at my line of work (software development in the regulatory space where we don't have clear internal requirements and users).

If I were to hazard a guess, the brain capacity that would have been used for image processing is being used for this instead.

Have you tried any visualisation exercises to attempt to reaccess your abilities?

[markers]

I think I know which ability you refer to, as my fear when I discovered this was that I couldn't work as a software developer anymore (before I got a grasp of what had actually happened, it took a while to actually understand the extent). I used to visualize arrays/tables/graphs in my head (like images/fancy animations) and do operations on them to imagine how one could transform them etc. But I also had/have a native sense of "depth" to data structures, which I also used. That one can move around in a data structure in a sense, I'm sure you know very well what I mean. Luckily that ability is still intact, which I've been relying a lot more on lately, but I can imagine you being much better than me on those kind of tools. The mind is so extremely fascinating, and it's so weird to think of the ways we think of things.

I tried visualization exercises (there's a lot more to the story that I didn't consider space to add here) and the first time they worked rather quickly, so I regained the ability in the course of days. But as I mentioned in another comment, I contracted covid again and then it was even worse than it had ever been and training didn't feel like it worked. I regained a little bit since that infection, but got covid yet again (it's an awful disease) and then it was back to square one. It seems like something in the brain had to heal before I could train it back up, but I'm afraid that the damage will be/is so severe that it will not be possible to recover (especially since I couldn't even create images in my dreams).

I might get better over time if I just stop getting covid, but as isolating myself is out of the question, that's unlikely to happen. Unfortunately it seems much harder to recover each time. Since last time it's not really been recovering. On the bright side, my sense of taste/smell has not been damaged again, which has been great.

[adastra22]

I'm aphantasic, but I also have a very good visual/geometric intuition. The brain's a funny thing that way. Give me a shape rotating problem and I'll get the answer pretty rapidly compared with a baseline, but it's by a process that doesn't involve explicit visualization.

Hopefully you'll be able to access similar mental pathways with practice.

[ryanjshaw]

Geez, what a rough time! Fascinating, though, yes I too have that "sense" of data structures - really interesting to hear that others do too!