(A)phantasia

phantasia. is like. you know the red apple experiment? like. visualize a red apple. what can you see? can you see a photorealistic red apple? can you see a red blob? can you see anything? what does seeing in your mind even mean?

when people describe phantasia to me i imagine it’s like. if you’ve never had the ability to smell (anosmic) in your life and someone is describing it to you. like what do you mean you have this sort of. weird auxillary sense. is it useful to you in any way? you mostly just use it to think ‘ahh that smells nice’??

one thing we experience is like. navigation. people say to us “we have a map in our head!”. what do you mean. huh? can you see it? why do you even have a maps app then?

when we try to navigate it’s like.

walking towards my destination
hmm… where is it?
second long pause
get an innate feeling of a Direction

sometimes it’s street by street. so it’s like. encoded as a set of turns with distance between them in my brain.

it’s not that i can’t draw or anything though. i can still sketch things out. i know the shape of things.

maybe i have. apantasia-spec. grey-aphantasic. demi-phantasic. maybe it can be learned. though i’m not sure how to learn it.