Aphantasia network

Intriguing topic and one I've talked on here about before, I think.

One slightly frustrating aspect for me is that I've found no resonance online with my experience, especially in the way the rating scales and quizzes are constructed. The latter seem to imply that the impact of aphantasia is simply to blur, or remove detail from, images in our "mind's eye", the implication being that some people can see almost photographic sharpness whilst others see blurry shapes and tones of colour as if through fog. My experience is that I see various *aspects* of an image, sometimes disjoint from each-other, but critically the image is *unstable* - so if I try to examine a particular part of it, it is apt to change or even disappear.

For example, if I try to imagine the Houses of Parliament seen from the bridge over the Thames, I can become "aware of" Big Ben and the building stretching away from me on my right, but I perceive this only as a "sense of" straight lines and yellowness of brick and dark water under sky. If I try to "look" at anything, the details disappear, or other parts of the "image" (such as it is) move around or disappear.

Intriguing topic and one I've talked on here about before, I think.

One slightly frustrating aspect for me is that I've found no resonance online with my experience, especially in the way the rating scales and quizzes are constructed. The latter seem to imply that the impact of aphantasia is simply to blur, or remove detail from, images in our "mind's eye", the implication being that some people can see almost photographic sharpness whilst others see blurry shapes and tones of colour as if through fog. My experience is that I see various *aspects* of an image, sometimes disjoint from each-other, but critically the image is *unstable* - so if I try to examine a particular part of it, it is apt to change or even disappear.

For example, if I try to imagine the Houses of Parliament seen from the bridge over the Thames, I can become "aware of" Big Ben and the building stretching away from me on my right, but I perceive this only as a "sense of" straight lines and yellowness of brick and dark water under sky. If I try to "look" at anything, the details disappear, or other parts of the "image" (such as it is) move around or disappear.

If anything, the fleeting glimpses that I get are only of details, as if my visual memory has all of the component geometry but can't fit them into a single coherent image, and no particular sensation lasts more than a fraction of a second. It's sometimes rather similar to having a word on the tip of one's tongue; an anticipatory feeling that something might be about to coalesce, but which never does.