My sister is aphantasic (she does not see any images in her head and cannot make them, when she closes her eyes all she sees is black.) And we’ve had a lot of very long discussions about it since exploring the inner machinations of someone else’s mind is fascinated, but now it’s sort of given me a crisis when reading.
When I read I have faint visualizations, but then I’ll notice that I’m conjuring images, so I focus on it and try to make it more vivid, and it totally falls apart. It goes from taking a mental photograph to trying to hand-draw. It’s made me question everything I know about reading lmao, like why do I even do it; for information? Fiction isn’t often informational. For vicariously living a characters life? Well It’s not the same as actually seeing and experiencing so I’m not even doing that, it’s just in my head! I used to think of reading as like a mental cinema but I’ve realized recently that while I usually remember what happens in books in high fidelity visual memory, in the act of reading it’s way less visual.
I’m curious, what is the act of reading like for you? Do you see things? How high quality are said things? How do you remember the happenings of a book, through visual memory or just through knowing facts about the plot?
by Sausage_fingies
2 Comments
for me, it’s kinda like a dream where you understand what’s going on but making out characters faces and specifics don’t exist lol
It actually changed as I grew older. I used to see things in a very sharp cinematic way. Especially when combined with an author with cinematic style I could visualize whole continuous scenes. But as I’ve aged, I’ve noticed that the backgrounds in my visualizations are more hazy and sometimes will be almost foggy watercolor or nonexistent. People’s faces are no longer discernable. And motions don’t carry through like they used to.
I do remember things visually but it’s in brief flashes of a visual idea and not whole scenes. A good example of this is the scene with Rue in the first Hunger Games book. I remember that scene because I remember what I saw when I read it not what I saw in the movie afterward. I remember the sound of the train I associated with the train scenes in Divergent too. But now that I’m older, I don’t get those as easy so keeping them in memory is harder.