Listening tonight to the ever excellent podcast “The curious cases of Rutherford and Fry” I was surprised and delighted to find that I was one of three precent of the population to have the condition I now know to be called `Aphantasia’, or the ‘blind mind’s-eye’.
I was surprised to find that I was not alone in my deficiency, difficult to express formally, to call images, memories and faces vividly to mind on request, delighted to find that it was an attribute I shared with at least some other people, and that it wasn’t a sign of some defect such as latent idiocy, or some moral shortcoming.
Aphantasia is often strongly linked with the absence of an internal monologue, something I am also seemingly lacking as I don’t recognise the description. It probably explains why I tend to live as a stranger in a strange land, assuming that other people don’t think as I do and therefore expecting to have to find out how they do think.
If you feel the same, you could do worse than have a look here:-
or here:-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
or here:-
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-the-minds-eye-is-blind1/
Windrince: aka Jon Moncrieff 