There’s more in this Scientific American piece. And yet he could describe Blair without any problem, including details like the colour of his eyes. They did an MRI and watched when he looked at a photo of former British prime minister Tony Blair, then asked him to describe Tony Blair and looked to see if the same sections of the brain lit up as when he looked at the photo, and they did not (for most people, they would). Eventually, they discovered that what he meant was he could no longer picture things in his mind. Ross linked to a New York Times story about a man who had surgery and when he awoke from the operation he complained that he had lost his imagination. I’m 30 years old and I never knew a human could do any of this. I thought “counting sheep” was a metaphor. I can’t “see” my father’s face or a bouncing blue ball, my childhood bedroom or the run I went on ten minutes ago. In the post, entitled “When you are blind in your mind,” Ross says: I started reading about it awhile back, when I came across two things at about the same time: One was a post by a friend on Facebook that mentioned that he has this condition, and the other was a post from Blake Ross, a famous software developer who was one of the original developers of the Mozilla Firefox browser, in which he described his gradual realization that he had the same condition. I’ve since learned that this is a phenomenon called “aphantasia,” a condition that was first mentioned in the 1800s but not really studied until relatively recently. I don’t see the person or the thing itself, in color, or even in black and white. It’s not just neutral objects either - this goes for loved ones, family members, pets, etc. The best I can do is try to remember a photograph of a sunset I saw, or a horse, but even then it’s a memory of having seen something. But if I try to think of what they look like with my eyes closed, I don’t see anything at all - not even a hazy representation of them. I obviously know what a horse and an apple and a sunset look like, and I can describe them in great detail. But here’s a question: When someone asks you to picture something in your mind - a horse, a sunset, a shiny red apple - and you close your eyes, what happens? Many people see a visual representation of that thing hovering in front of their “mind’s eye,” and in some cases it is in full colour, like they were looking at a photograph but in their mind. So it’s hard to even describe properly, since different people are going to experience things differently, even if we are trying to talk about the same thing. This is a difficult topic to talk about, since it involves things that happen exclusively inside your (or my) mind, which by definition can’t be experienced by anyone else.
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