Learned a new word reading this article about a rare brain condition. Aphantasia is strange ailment:
For such individuals, literature may produce facts but not visual representations. Arrakis isn't a planet of vast deserts but vast emptiness, Gandalf the Grey a colorless, featureless blob. Sunny beaches can't be visited in their imaginations but must remain on the office calendar until summer vacation. And while memories exist, they cannot be visually recalled except between scrapbook cellophane.
It made me wonder if there could be degrees of difficultly in producing visual representations for people and even for the same person over a period of time. As a child and young person, it was incredibly easy for me to escape into world of the book I was reading, be able to see myself as a character in the story as it unfolded. It used to be a full immersive experience. Today, it is orders of magnitude harder for me and I envy my peers who still have access to this wonderful escape.
I took the quiz on the topic and it turns out that I am somewhere on the scale where I do have ability to create mental images.
Imaginative experiences vary greatly from person to person — there exists a wide spectrum from no mental imagery to hyper-vivid imagination. Both extremes have their pros and cons. Mental imagery can be a useful cognitive tool and an intrusive one, as you can probably imagine. What new research and ground-breaking discoveries into extreme imagination reveals is, — We all imagine differently and these invisible differences impact how we think, create, and dream.
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