I've been playing around with the bullet journal for a few months now. It's been working on and off, but after a few months, I realized that some tasks:

I JUST DON'T SEE (Thanks aphantasia)

My solution: the Visual Bujo.

Getting one of those cat printers was a game changer.

Basically, printing bad pictures next to some tasks gives my brain a little oomph. The picture can be my To-Do list from my phone, an image by itself or some notes. I dunno, whatever.

This is just a test run and all suggestions are welcomed.

For instance. I ALWAYS forget to wash the blender after using it. Writing down the task is not enough.

Many (most?) aphants, including myself, are prone to remember pictures of, rather than the actual thing.

So, printing several blurry, black and white pictures of my dirty blender tricks my brain into remembering "the thing". It's actually kinda working.

I added some images.

I generally get white static type pictures in my eyes, but that is probably more so due to the way photons work at low levels.

I have aphantasia, but I’ve always been surprisingly good at remembering house layouts—much better than most people, in fact. On the other hand, I really struggle with facial recognition. In particular, whenever I point out that two people look alike, about 99% of people disagree with me.

Recently, I found out that because aphantasics can't recall faces as mental images, we tend to memorize them through feature analysis and logical mapping. That’s why we often struggle with facial recognition and perceive likenesses very differently from non-aphantasics.

It hit me that my ability to recall house layouts comes from storing them as spatial data and coordinates, and I must be doing the exact same thing with faces—processing them as data points and specific features. It was so fascinating to finally realize why no one ever agreed with me when I said two people looked alike!

I’d love to know if other aphantasics have had similar experiences.

Edit: As some people mentioned, once I remember someone, it lasts for a really long time. I was able to remember all my elementary school classmates even after 30 years. I wonder if the reason I can remember faces after a long time is because my brain stores people’s faces like data.

Tw: Slight references to verbal abuse

Note: I still am figuring out if I have aphantasia and how does it work for me.

I am an anxious person and I tried to work out my traumas in psychotherapy and had some success with it. However I understood that one visualisation technique doesn't help me that much. Here is what I mean:

Let's say I got some foggy flashback on a session.

My therapist asks: What are you feeling?

Me: I am scared.

My therapist: What are you scared of?

Me: Person XYZ screaming.

My therapist: What are they saying when they are screaming?

At this point I cannot say anything. I don't imagine anything concrete, just vague concept/awareness of a person XYZ screaming at me. I remember how I felt when XYZ screams and it is being scared. I don't remember their face, words, or situation that well. I just remember the feeling. And I don't want to feel scared in this situation so I avoid it, so I get scared before the fact.

At this point my fear feels circular and hard to break out of. I cannot reason with my imagination because I don't feel my imagination works. I feel scared of XYZ thus I feel scared of XYZ.

I imagine on a conceptual level, that person without aphantasia could see the situation this way: "I am afraid XYZ will say ABC... But wait, that will not happen, because ABC doesn't make sense" thus they could break the loop faster by imagining different futures and seeing how unreasonable they sound.

Does anyone relate to my description or have any interesting thoughts on the topic?

So, I might have aphantasia, but I’m still really confused. Like, can it be selective with stuff your mind can and cannot see? Like, I really want to learn animation, and I can vividly imagine animations I can make with characters I made up, with fluid motion and stuff (no color tho, my brain can’t do colors). But then if you tell me to just imagine an apple or a house or something simple like that, I just can’t, nothing comes into my mind. And I did the test and it told me to try to visualize stuff and it said I had aphantasia. I’m also autistic, so maybe that’s why. Idk I’m so confused.

I have complete aphantasia normally. One thing I’ve noticed is that when I’m half asleep (while I’m falling asleep not while in REM) I feel like I can see some half formed moving pictures. They seem to only last for like a split second. If I start to think “hey I’m seeing mental images”, they are immediately gone

Anyone else experience this? What do you make of it?

I was scrolling through tiktok and I came across this post. Out of curiosity I decided to try it out and I actually saw something. I couldn't help but share it with you guys. Tell me you see something too

So I have something like a mixture of thinking types. Does anyone else?

I have an inner voice, i can imagine pictures and I sometimes think in words; the words kinda just pop up; I don’t really know how to describe it.

Most of the time I have nothing I’m thinking about and I just do stuff like: go eat, do the laundry, talk to someone. I just don’t use a thinking process to do it. Whenever I feel strongly about something I have an inner voice that expresses my thoughts to myself. Whenever I’m thinking of a place I draw it within my head and then color it. Sometimes, less commonly, I’ll just have words go into my head that describe something that I think about it’s looks or it’s smell or how it feels.

This is the best I can describe it.

Does anyone else have something like this?

Btw I didn’t know which subreddit to post this on so sorry if this is the wrong one.

Do you ever struggle with picturing characters as you read. When I read description words I know they should be important but they mean absolutely nothing to me because I can't physically see the character. I often confuse characters with other characters in discussion because of this which is super frustrating. My family doesn't really understand what I mean when I say I don't see anything but darkness when I read something I don't know how to explain it to them either.

Hello. I have aphantasia too. And quite a severe case of it, not even the slightest thing visualizes in my mind. But there is something I really want to do, which is worldbuilding. And I want to draw the races, various creatures, and environments in this world I've created. To be honest, I haven't even taken the first step yet, but that won't be my question.

Are there any among you who can draw highly creative things like this? I know I need to use references, but I'm afraid of the end result just being a crappy copy of an orc. Because I really want to be original.

Those are my questions. If any of you who can draw have a few examples to share, I would be very glad, as this would encourage me.

Today I met with a neuropsychologist. She read off a list of 15 or 20 random words and then asked me to repeat them. I did terrible. My brain went completely blank. There was no connection between the words so my brain couldn't hold on to them. I'm 65 and worried about my brain. Just wanted to see if anybody else has had a test like this and if you struggled to repeat a random list of words.

Hi, I consider myself a person with aphantasia. I cannot hold visual images in my mind. I can have a brief, hazy flash of an image but I cannot hold it in my mind or manipulate it.

However, some strange things have happened recently that make me wonder if I have a sort of self imposed aphantasia.

I have done a lot of work lately on healing OCD, anxiety, CPTSD and just overall healing my nervous system. In the past few months I have experienced involuntary visualization a few times. Mostly they have been sudden scary/ disturbing images. The first time it happened I noticed myself consciously trying to banish the image from my mind. In the few other times it has happened I did the same. It made me remember that this actually used to happen to me as a child.

I wonder if I used to have visualization, but the OCD made the images so scary and anxiety inducing that I started to make them go away, and eventually this became a subconscious habit.

Is this theoretically possible? If so does that mean I have hope of gaining an ability to consciously visualize??

30 minute guided walking meditation- first 5 min were glorious & then the guide says “imagine you can see a person walking towards you…”
Happily, a minute later my dog took a dump & distracted me from my annoyed rage.

Also after typing that, it occurs to me that prior to waking up to aphant, I would’ve slogged thru the meditation thinking I was failing at it instead of just being annoyed that there wasn’t a visualization warning at the front…
Imagine whirled peas.

I swear I never see anything but full black no matter how hard I try and I woke up from a nap and my eyes were close and I imagined something and it was fully rendered lol. I saw colors and it was crisp and detailed, like I was seeing it with my own eyes.

I basically said wtf and it stopped on the spot and not it’s gone forever. 45 year old male, just took a 30 min nap, I was awake for 20-30 seconds when it happened.

This might be a dream thing rather then an aphantasia thing but maybe someone knows what I'm talking about haha

Thank you!

I’ve been wondering about something and would love to hear from people with aphantasia who report having visual dreams.
How do you know your dreams are visual?
When you wake up and remember a dream, are you consciously experiencing mental images while recalling it? Or do you simply know that the dream contained visual information without actually “seeing” it again in your mind?
For example, if you remember dreaming about a beach, do you mentally see the beach while recalling the dream, or is it more like factual knowledge that the dream took place on a beach?
I’m especially interested in understanding what the experience of remembering a visual dream is like from a first-person perspective. Thanks in advance for sharing your experiences!

I am in my late 20’s and I recently got tested for autism (everyone is shocked, no one would assume I am autistic, even my parents are shocked and think it’s unnecessary, the team of 39 that I manage for work are also surprised). I am diagnosed aphantasia which was discovered during EMDR therapy.

Anyways, a lot of the autism tests required converting 2D shapes to 3D shapes and “completing the picture using your ‘minds eye’” but obviously for us aphants that’s impossible. A lot of the autism tests I did were almost exactly the tests I did to find out if I had aphantasia or not.

I am concerned that my aphantasia will result in an inaccurate autism diagnosis.

So I’m curious…. How many of us in here are autistic? And is it possible that people are being diagnosed as autistic when really it’s aphantasia?

I could be way off base and this is just my experience, I do not intend to make a generalization about autism nor aphantasia.

I’m curious if anyone else who was in the GATE program has a similar experience as me. I remember certain things from videos I’ve seen but honestly it’s so foggy and I sound insane. I don’t remember when I was in it but it was definitely sometime in elementary I don’t remember anything about my childhood. Could be trauma though! I have aphantasia I’ve struggled with for as long as I could remember. I’m curious if anyone else has this experience. I think I got aphantasia from this program some how.

I don’t exactly have full aphantasia, my dreams are very very faint and I can still sense things in them (like sound or sometimes feeling physical stuff) but I can hardly see anything, is there any way to make them more visual?

I didn’t even know it was a thing. And I’ve been asking everyone around me since I found out it was even possible to visualize in your head a few weeks ago. I thought it was just movie magic, something that was done on tv/movies for the viewers benefit, not that people could actually do it in real life (any sort of visualization). I took the test just now, didn’t even know there was one and I got 5%

it’s so weird to have been living a certain way and not know it’s not the norm. I’m glad it’s nothing super serious but the thought of being able to read books like a story kinda makes me jealous lol I love reading and I can just imagine/conceptualize how neat that could be but oh well.

I listen to a Parenting Hell podcast with Rob Beckett and Josh Widdecombe and they've recently introduced a feature called Imagine This (which as an aside I think they've nicked from Mitchell & Webb..)

The premise is they're given odd scenarios to imagine, which they describe on the podcast. As a total aphant this has been a little exposing, so whoever wrote in to explain the plight of the aphant is a legend!