When I got back from vacation Tuesday, my computer was back from the shop where it had been for repairs. Everything seemed to be back to normal except when I tried to scroll with the wheel on my mouse what was on the screen went the opposite direction from what I intended.
Apple calls that the “natural” scroll direction. To me, it is anything but natural. I have long suspected Apple does these things just to be contrary to Microsoft, but something I recently learned about has me wondering if Apple engineers just experience the world a lot differently than I do.
Last year, scientists at the University of Exeter in Great Britain published a paper describing a new condition they call “aphantasia.”
Imagine a cat. Now, imagine that when you try to imagine a cat, you see nothing. That is aphantasia. Although most people get a mental image of a thing when they try, some people, including yours truly, cannot.
In the media it has been described as mental blindness or the absence of a mind’s eye.
For 53 years, I thought counting sheep was just counting. When I tried to engage in that activity to go to sleep, try as I might, I could never conjure a sheep, much less multiple sheep to count. I ended up repeating Hail Marys instead. Don’t ask me why.
I always assumed it was just a figure of speech, but there is actual evidence that other people (most, I am told) have this ability to some degree or another. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies have shown that when people are asked to picture something in their heads, the same areas of their brains fire as if they were actually looking at the thing.
That, of course, makes a lot of sense because it is not the eyes that actually see. The eyes merely collect light, then the brain constructs the imagery. This has led art historians to speculate the art of certain painters such as Modigliani, Van Gogh and Degas was influenced by eye disease that gave them a distorted view of the world. Perhaps, though, it was their mind’s eye that was distorted.
This is somewhat controversial, but my point is that our own experience of the world tends to colour our perception of how others experience it.
Discovering my aphantasia was revelatory in many ways. First of all, what have I been doing for five decades if not picturing things in my head? It was very difficult to get a handle on, and is even more difficult to explain, but basically my mental images are more of an inventory. It takes place at great speed, but basically if asked to picture a cat the process is: pointy ears, flat face, button nose, whiskers, fur, paws, claws, attitude. I know what a cat is. I know one to see one, but when I close my eyes I just see darkness.
It is not really a handicap, per se, but I might not make a great eye witness. I wonder how long it will be before aphantasia shows up in case law, or at least in a crime drama.
While perhaps not a handicap, I do recognize various impacts aphantasia may have had on my life. For example, I have never really enjoyed writing that is heavily visually descriptive. The fiction I like is more plot-driven and concerned with the intellectual and emotional exploration of character.
I am way more analytical than visual. I wonder now if it has made me less credulous since I rely more on what I think that what I see.
Discovering aphantasia has also given me an even greater appreciation—although no greater tolerance—for how people such as Conservative leadership candidate Kelly Leitch can be so wrong about everything even though they share the exact same hardware that I have.
This newly discovered condition is further evidence we are ruled by software, which tends to be kind of buggy.
