'I can't imagine anything worse': A salute to Prince Philip (in his own words) (The Little Book of...)

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Zeman A, Dewar M, Della Sala S. Lives without imagery - Congenital aphantasia. Cortex. 2015;73:378–380. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2015.05.019 When I talk to you about how you read books, I feel like I’m missing out on so much. You say when you read a book it plays out in your head like a film. For me, it’s just my voice reciting words. There’s no images, there’s no main character, there’s nothing like that. I read Harry Potter before the film came out, and I remember at the time a lot of people going ‘Oh that’s not how I imagined Hermione’. And I remember thinking, What does that mean? ''That's who she is.”

making the decision. Carefully, Solomon weighed both sides of the issue. If twelve again became the sum of two primes, then the conditions according to which God and the mathematicians had agreed would be satisfied. And if twelve remained not the sum of two primes,again the conditions according to which God and the mathematicians had agreed would be satisfied. How Solomonic it would be to satisfy the conditions twice over! Imaginative Resistance is explained by the following two considerations: (1) the scenarios that evoke imaginative resistance are conceptually impossible; (2) the conceptual impossibility of these scenarios renders them unimaginable. Based on your last paragraph, you might be interested in Thomas Nagel's The View From Nowhere. In that, he argues that it is impossible to achieve a completely objective perspective--- what he calls the View From Nowhere. This isn't directly related to your first paragraph, but something you might enjoy.The abandonment of intentional thinking is achieved in the second jhana. In fact the first jhana maintains a very subtle form of thinking (Pali vitakka) that is firm and directed but not discursive. The Buddha ( MN 19) gives the simile of a cowherd in the shade of a tree mindfully aware of his cows after the crops have been harvested. In the second jhana even this subtle vitakka is abandoned (there remains awareness but not 'imagining'). In MN 19, Thanissaro Bikkhu translates: "rapture & pleasure born of composure, unification of awareness free from directed thought & evaluation — internal assurance". It’s like a list. A very detailed one that i can remember. I don’t think it hinders me in any way whatsoever but I do spend a lot of time wondering just what it would be like should i suddenly be able to ‘see’ these images. After a lifetime of no images I think it would be very intrusive and I worry that I'd lose my mind by being bombarded with things I've never lived with."

I suppose you could say my imagination is broken, but each of us can only experience our own thoughts, so it is hard to compare. For this reason, it is difficult to know how many people have aphantasia, but academics have developed a test using visualisation questions. It has been associated with similar conditions such as face blindness or tone deafness, though it does not affect cognitive or physical function.

But how can I know that what you see in your mind is different to what I see? Perhaps we see the same thing but describe it differently. Perhaps we see different things but describe them the same. One way to resolve all this is to think of nothing and everything as properties of something, not complements to it. Every something is just a bit of nothing and a bit of everything combined. To put it another way, anything can look like nothing if there's none of it, or it can look like everything if you have all of it. Nothing and everything are properties of objects comprised of something. As much as the inability to imagine seems like an impediment, it's well accepted in society that people who live in the present are a lot happier than people who worry about the future, or dwell on the past. Well, you could argue that the same problem exists with "everything". Can we think of everything? How would we know if we were thinking of everything, or just something that looks like everything? What if we could think of everything, what would it look like? To have everything in your mind, all at once, complete in a singular whole? One could argue that the singular nature of everything makes it indistinguishable from nothing (which is also singular). This is another way of expressing the paradox, that nothing and everything are equally intangible, and in some meaningful sense indistinguishable. In our study, we asked self-described aphantasics to imagine either a red circle with horizontal lines or a green circle with vertical lines for six seconds before being presented with a binocular rivalry display while wearing the glasses. They then indicated which image they saw. They repeated this for close to 100 trials.

We find ourselves unwilling to imagine this as truth. We are inclined to say, even within the world of the story, the narrator is wrong. What explains this resistance to make-believe? One hypothesis posits that propositions which we judge to be morally deviant are not make-believable, because they represent an impossible state of affairs. If we believe that infanticide is always wrong in the real world, we simply cannot make sense of what a world would be like if that world is said to be one in which infanticide is always right. We can state "The impossibility hypothesis" thus: We use how often a person sees the image they imagine as a measure of objective visual imagery. Because we’re not relying on the participant rating the vividness of the image in their mind, but on what they physically see in the binocular rivalry display, it removes the need for subjective introspection. At some point when your brain has everything on autopilot and your thoughts stop arising, you'll lose the teapot, and as a consequence be left with no thought at all. A good little test for me is drawing. I can copy things almost like for like if they are in front of me, but if I were to draw from my imagination it would look terrible. It doesn’t mean you cannot be creative; you just have to adapt.

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Before seeing that tweet, I had no idea aphantasia existed let alone that my own imagination was something out of the ordinary. I simply assumed all people saw the same vapid, nondescript nothingness when they closed their eyes, and that the majority of language associated with mental imagery — such as picturing your happy place or counting sheep to fall asleep —was metaphorical rather than literal.