#mindseye — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

A fantasia on aphantasia

Once again, I interrupt my as-yet-still-untitled long-form story to bring you a personal blog post. This one’s not quite an ‘unpost’ but might nevertheless be a bit on the rambly and ill-formed side, hence ‘fantasia’. That’s because it’s a reaction to something I discovered about myself (and everyone else) only yesterday. And when I say yesterday, I literally mean Tuesday 27 November 2018. Mozart’s Fantasia in C minor, K.396 Unlike my unposts, this post has a picture attached. It’s the opening bar of a Mozart fantasia that I enjoy playing on the piano. Fantasias are pieces of music that spring from the imagination and don’t necessarily adhere to any particular compositional form. They’re often more interesting to me than sonatas, for instance, because they take all sorts of unexpected twists and turns. My life has taken quite a few unexpected twists and turns in the last couple of years, and to some extent it’s been a belated voyage of self-discovery for me. But yesterday’s revelation really came completely out of the blue, thanks to a tweet by autistic advocate and academic Shona Davison. She introduced me to the word aphantasia (and the derived word aphantasic). When I was in secondary school, I remember a teacher talking about ‘the mind’s eye’. She said it refers to how we see things in our imagination, but assured us that we don’t actually have an extra eye in our head – it’s just an expression. Fair enough, I thought – I’ll add that to my lexicon. Little did I realise at the time that my entirely abstract conception of the mind’s eye might not have been shared by any of my classmates. I’ve never had any doubt that some people can conjure up vivid images in their heads. People with photographic memory, for instance, or artists who can paint from memory. But these are exceptional people with rare talents. I’ve always assumed that when most people are asked to close their eyes and picture a favourite place, they’re doing much the same thing as me. When I close my eyes, the world goes dark. There are no visual images for me; maybe faint, brief, sub-millisecond flashes of light or shadowy nebulous blobs, but certainly nothing I have any control over. When I ‘picture’ a scene, I work my way around it serially, picking out things and naming them – but never seeing them. Yes, I can imagine some… Continue reading A fantasia on aphantasia →