Alec Figueroa
Mar 9, 202266 min read
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What is Aphantasia?
Aphantasia is defined as the inability to form mental images of objects that are not present.
Aphantasia is a peculiar phenomenon. There is still so much that the scientific community is discovering about the mind's eye. What is it? How do we define it? Is the experience of the mind's eye the same across the board? That there are so many questions which we're still answering, this makes defining the lack of a mind's eye very challenging.
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What we do know is that fMRI data displays a difference in how an aphantasic's mind works compared to a visualizer's. Yet what does this tell us about the benefits of a visual imagination or lack there of?
Do I Have Aphantasia?
How to know for sure?
Answering this question for oneself is definitely a challenge. Research is still sparse and our understanding of the visual imagination in general is constantly growing. This makes self diagnosis tricky. How does one step outside ones own thought-life to know for sure that they indeed are experiencing aphantasia?
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One question to ask is this: do you only experience thought in words? If so, you may be aphantasic.
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Even so, asking the right questions is only part of challenge. There do exist methods to somewhat test for aphantasia, one being the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ), though this questionnaire does not directly removing subjectivity.
We're working on new testing methods to help bring objectivity to the diagnosis process. To see more info on what studies we're currently running, click the link below.
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In 2022, I decided to do something radical: I'd release all of my mind's eye content and information in a giant guide. This essentially caused us to take an open-source approach to how we operate here at RCDC.
Check out my latest blog post on the left.
And for my open source mind's eye training materials, click the button below.
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