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A deaf and blind mind: What it’s like to have no visual imagination and no inner voice?


Look at these pictures. Can you see a cube on the left and a face on the right?

Black lines form a cube shape on left and a yellow plastic frame with blue mop head looks like a face with hair

What do you see?(Derek Arnold/The Conversation/Adobe Stock)

Can you imagine seeing things in your mind? Can you hear an inner voice when you think or read?

One of the authors, Loren Bouyer, cannot do any of these things. To Loren the left-hand image looks like a jumble of two-dimensional shapes, and she can only see a mop on the right.

Loren cannot imagine audio or visual sensations, or hear an inner voice when she reads. She has a condition we describe as “deep aphantasia” in a new paper in Frontiers in Psychology.

A ‘blind mind’

Both authors are aphantasics — we are unable to have imagined visual experiences.

Aphantasia is often described as “having a blind mind”. But often we cannot have other imagined experiences either. So an aphantasic might have a blind and a deaf mind, or a blind and a tasteless mind.

We are often asked what it’s like to be aphantasic. Some analogies might help.

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People have multilingual minds

​Most people can experience an inner voice when they think. You might only speak one language, so your inner voice will “speak” that language.

However, you understand that other people can speak different languages. So, you can perhaps imagine what it would be like to hear your inner voice speak multiple different languages.



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