Imagery, Imagination, and Aphantasia
“Before I knew I had Aphantasia, it didn’t even occur to me that imagination could be visual process. I just thought of concepts in a more abstract sense, and mentally added other elements or concepts to it as my imagination allowed. No images necessary.”
In this post we'll dive into the spectrum between mental visualization and aphantasia, from the ability to create complex images in your mind to being completely blind. And we'll see how workflow often changes based on those mental skills.
I want to start with a small experiment. You can close your eyes or keep them open.
Picture a person in a room pushing a ball on a table.
That's it. You can do it now before continue reading.
Now for some questions: Did you actually see something? Was the picture in your mind vivid?
If it was: what was the room like? Was it night or day? What color was the ball? What material was the ball? Was the person a man or a woman? How was he or she dressed? What color and material was the table? What shape did it have? How did the person push the ball, was it a light push or a strong push, how heavy was the ball?
If you could answer most or all those questions and then some then you have a strong ability to visualize. If you could answer a few of them then you're still able to visualize, but it might not be as strong a system as it could. On the other hand, if you closed your eyes and literally all you could see was the back of your eyelids, and all you could do was to think about the concept of a person in a room pushing a ball on a table, you might have a blind "mind's eye". But stick around anyway, there will be useful information for you as well in this article.
WHAT IS IMAGERY?
The brain is like a black box, it has no direct contact with the outside world except for the information it has been fed by its sensory inputs. What we are able to see, hear, taste, smell, feel, is the consequence of the brain processing that information and letting us "experience" it. Imagery (or more commonly called, visualization) is simply the ability to bypass the outsource of external input and make the brain feed itself with imaginary stimuli. It is the ability to internally represent information without the need of any external stimuli. It often happens when we day dream, imagine something, try to plan the next project, and so on… This ability is often called the "mind's eye", but it's not limited to sight. It can very well be used to generate hearing (playing a song in your head), physical sensations like movements, tastes, smell, and so on… And as we play these "movies" in our head, the experience can become as vivid as real life.
How can this be useful? Visualization can be used as a tool that helps us save resources in different domains, when we are trying to create something new, or as a fictitious experience when we practice something without having to physically do it. It's like drawing the sketch of a house before building it, or in this case, visualizing the sketch of the house without having to draw it. When creating a drawing or animating an action, we are able to fully visualize the scene before we start. And we are able to zoom in, zoom out, rotate the model, slow down or accelerate the movement, focus on a detail or the big picture, and so on… All of this happening in our head before we even touch the pencil. During problem solving, we can use our mind's eye to freely transform and manipulate the different pieces of our puzzle. We can mentally create work, erase it, correct it, and try again at a faster rate, without physical effort, and without committing anything to paper or pixel. The same is true with hearing (to create rhythm and melody) and all the other senses. Visualization for most people is as natural as walking and for them it's a common, most of the time overlooked, part of the process of creation.
Even though the research seems to be quite young in this field, imagery at the moment appears to be both an innate and practicable skill. Some people are naturally very good at it, and most of them can improve the quality of their imagery through practice, but some lack the ability to visualize all together.
APHANTASIA
Aphantasia is the word that define people who completely lack mental imagery. If during the test in the beginning all you could see was blackness than this might be you. People with aphantasia can think about the concept of "person in a room pushing a ball on a table", but they are not able to visualize it. They can reason through visual information via conceptual thinking, knowing for example that a certain color could go well with another one, even though they would need to see it live before being sure. Or thinking about relative positions of different parts of the body, a person with aphantasia can talk and reason through things, they are just unable to preview them in their heads. Even though aphantasia is something that is not being studied very well up to this day, there is good anecdotal evidence that this isn't in any way an handicap, even though it is definitively something that needs to be taken into consideration in our workflow.
Interviews with aphantasic artists highlight a couple of key strategies in their creative process that work around the inability to visualize:
They emphasize putting anything down on the white paper (or any other device, depending on what you're working with), no matter what it is. This can be their way of quickly visualizing what's in their mind, outsourcing the input to their brain with something physical. Now that they have it in front of them, they are able to see what's working, what's not, and make changes. This starts a feedback loop between creating and assessing that will eventually lead to the final product.
Use reference. Many people (whether with aphantasia or not) use references in their work, but people with aphantasia might rely on them a bit more, incentivizing taking more detailed references and sometimes creating almost a collage of them to make something that will look like the final product. This can be one of the ways to outsource input and get something down that can be improved and worked upon.
Practice. The brain can have its own ways, and if you’re skilled enough you can trust that what you’re thinking will magically fall into place through your fingers on your screen or paper. With enough muscle memory under your belt, you won’t need to visualize your creation beforehand. (learn more about this here)
Here is one example of aphantasic creativity in action:
There are many artists and creative people with aphantasia out there. Creativity has little to do with imagery, and people can be imaginative and creative without having to visualize things in their mind.
On the day to day living, aphantasia just seems to be a different type of human experience, one with its pros and cons— neither better or worse.
Everyone is difference, with different skills and talents that we carry with us from our genetic makeup and our previous life experiences. I think your workflow should be what actually works for you as an individual, whether you can visualize or not, if you are right handed or left handed, if you can sketch or can't draw a single line. All these things are just part of who you are and simply need to be taken into consideration so that you can experiment with different techniques, and with a little practice, hopefully find your way and find something that fits. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that.
For more resources on aphantasia, you can check out:
https://aphantasia.com/
Book: Aphantasia: Experiences, Perceptions, and Insights by Alan Kendle
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