LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Are you able to visualize what is happening in this passage?
This is from Bleak House by Charles Dickens, if you are curious.
I sort of just try to contextualize the words and their meaning and draw upon my experiences to fill in the blanks. I still have other senses and my own mental concept of things and how they fit together. I can imagine “faces scowling” or a muddy street and how that affects the story and its setting, just not visually.
I will often infer the emotions of a scene and place myself within that context, since I usually am drawn to more character-driven experiences. I know what a room will look like based on the description, I just can’t hold an image of it in my mind.
I should also note that there are levels of aphantasia and everyone is different. I kind of have a little bit of visualization, but not much. Like limbs moving, some motions, etc. kind of like stick figures that can barely move. It doesn’t allow me to “see” things with any detail, and if I were to try to visualize (for example) a golfer taking a swing, the swing gets to the ball and then stops. There’s no physics applied to it.
I actually joined a psychological study in undergrad, because it was mandatory to do some, that was about visualizing and that’s how I discovered that I have aphantasia. They asked me to visualize and describe certain things and I was like, “I can’t” for basically every question. The researcher’s face was sort of priceless, lol.
Usually understood to be a violation of ethics if they didn’t provide you the opportunity for an alternative assignment btw.
Thanks for the explanation. It’s very interesting to learn about how others perceive the world.
Yeah, there totally were alternatives, but they were like, writing a 20-page paper or presenting a topic directly to the professor during her office hours.
It seemed like more of a time-save for me and a boon to the researchers to just do some studies. I think it was only 5-10 and it was really simple to sign up.