Post by Admin on Sept 4, 2023 12:06:22 GMT
Aphantasia can be a gift to philosophers and critics like me
psyche.co/ideas/aphantasia-can-be-a-gift-to-philosophers-and-critics-like-me
Aphantasia veils the past and the future from the mind’s eye. That can be a gift to philosophers like Derek Parfit and me
There’s an early memory from my childhood, representative of its peak happiness. I’m on a simple, iron child’s seat on my father’s bike. He’s just picked me up from kindergarten and is taking me home through the forest on the way to our house. It is a spectacularly fluorescent Danish spring, and we’re travelling through woodland illuminated, from above, by the light-green foliage of the tall beeches only just coming into soft leaves and, from below, by snow-white forest anemones spreading around us in dense, endless carpets.
Bringing this scene to my mind, I don’t ‘see’ anything. I have aphantasia, the neurological condition of being unable to visualise imagery, also described as the absence of the ‘mind’s eye’. Still, I know that those visual elements were there; they’re stored in my mind as knowledge and concepts; and I have particular and strong emotional responses to the thought of the light and colours.
Until very recently, I had always assumed that my experience of reality was typical, and that being able to see only things that are actually there – present and visible in the external surroundings – was normal. But discovering that I have aphantasia brought to my awareness differences in perception and self-conception between me and others that I’d always registered on some level, and felt disturbed by, but had never consciously thought about.
The further I’ve delved into research on this neurological anomaly, the more extensive its explanatory reach has proven. It has been like finding the master key to my life and personality, and has significantly deepened my understanding of my psychology, my philosophical views, and my aesthetic and literary preferences.
The distinction between what ‘is’ and what ‘isn’t there’ in external reality is, of course, problematic, as philosophy has observed through the ages and has been confirmed by modern neuroscience. On the predictive processing model of consciousness – one of the more prominent neuroscientific theories today – most of what humans perceive as external reality is projection. The neuroscientist Anil Seth thus explains that the phenomena we experience as objective and independently existing in our surroundings are, to a great degree, our brain’s best guesses about that reality, generated as a response to an external reality, but based on saved data and expectations – and, as such, a form of controlled hallucination.
This makes me wonder how I’m able to project unconsciously what appears to me as fully fledged external reality, and thus successfully form images as part of the brain’s predictive processing, but not consciously create images. How can I perceive anything visually? I asked Seth about this at a talk I attended, and he put me in touch with the psychologist Adam Zeman at the University of Exeter who is involved in some of the first extensive studies on aphantasia. Zeman gave me a test that measures visual vividness on a continuum. While such tests entail some uncertainty, in part because they rely on subjective reporting which is fallible, the result was unambiguous: I have ‘extreme aphantasia’– ie, no ability to summon up internally even the vaguest, blurriest contours of a specific object. Neither my memory nor my imagination has any visual dimension.
psyche.co/ideas/aphantasia-can-be-a-gift-to-philosophers-and-critics-like-me
Aphantasia veils the past and the future from the mind’s eye. That can be a gift to philosophers like Derek Parfit and me
There’s an early memory from my childhood, representative of its peak happiness. I’m on a simple, iron child’s seat on my father’s bike. He’s just picked me up from kindergarten and is taking me home through the forest on the way to our house. It is a spectacularly fluorescent Danish spring, and we’re travelling through woodland illuminated, from above, by the light-green foliage of the tall beeches only just coming into soft leaves and, from below, by snow-white forest anemones spreading around us in dense, endless carpets.
Bringing this scene to my mind, I don’t ‘see’ anything. I have aphantasia, the neurological condition of being unable to visualise imagery, also described as the absence of the ‘mind’s eye’. Still, I know that those visual elements were there; they’re stored in my mind as knowledge and concepts; and I have particular and strong emotional responses to the thought of the light and colours.
Until very recently, I had always assumed that my experience of reality was typical, and that being able to see only things that are actually there – present and visible in the external surroundings – was normal. But discovering that I have aphantasia brought to my awareness differences in perception and self-conception between me and others that I’d always registered on some level, and felt disturbed by, but had never consciously thought about.
The further I’ve delved into research on this neurological anomaly, the more extensive its explanatory reach has proven. It has been like finding the master key to my life and personality, and has significantly deepened my understanding of my psychology, my philosophical views, and my aesthetic and literary preferences.
The distinction between what ‘is’ and what ‘isn’t there’ in external reality is, of course, problematic, as philosophy has observed through the ages and has been confirmed by modern neuroscience. On the predictive processing model of consciousness – one of the more prominent neuroscientific theories today – most of what humans perceive as external reality is projection. The neuroscientist Anil Seth thus explains that the phenomena we experience as objective and independently existing in our surroundings are, to a great degree, our brain’s best guesses about that reality, generated as a response to an external reality, but based on saved data and expectations – and, as such, a form of controlled hallucination.
This makes me wonder how I’m able to project unconsciously what appears to me as fully fledged external reality, and thus successfully form images as part of the brain’s predictive processing, but not consciously create images. How can I perceive anything visually? I asked Seth about this at a talk I attended, and he put me in touch with the psychologist Adam Zeman at the University of Exeter who is involved in some of the first extensive studies on aphantasia. Zeman gave me a test that measures visual vividness on a continuum. While such tests entail some uncertainty, in part because they rely on subjective reporting which is fallible, the result was unambiguous: I have ‘extreme aphantasia’– ie, no ability to summon up internally even the vaguest, blurriest contours of a specific object. Neither my memory nor my imagination has any visual dimension.