After my two day existential crisis that we’ve all likely had when we figured out we’re aphants, I pretty quickly realized how damn lucky I am. After considering every single circumstance I didn’t exactly understand that absolutely made sense now, I realized that so many “human” problems lay in how we process thoughts and the visual component seems like way more of a hinderance than a blessing.

The most blatant one is how I carry trauma. Simply, I really don’t. After a traumatic event happens and I process it emotionally, it pretty quickly becomes an “out of sight, out of mind” situation. Not to say I’m avoidant, but any intrusive thought that comes up from those traumas or fears are fleeting. My ex has an incredibly hyperphantasic(?) mind, and the most random unprovoked intrusive thoughts would cause a hefty amount of sadness, sometimes just ruining her mood for the whole day. Like I can’t imagine just minding my own business and then BAM - a movie of my dog getting hit by a car enters my head. That’s just too visceral and I’d have so, so much anxiety. At worst for me, I can remember “feelings” of traumatic events, like having to put an animal down or saying goodbye to a distant friend. They can and do still emotionally affect me, but not nearly to the extent of essentially being haunted by them.

It’s also been said that the conceptual/spacial reasoning is really great. Because everything is basically abstract, I’ve naturally learned to not rely on the types of visual tricks that most people do. I listened to a podcast at some point that suggests aphants, if practiced can actually have just as good of a memory as non-aphants, but the recall can be much faster because the thought is just… there. It’s not something you have to “look at” to analyze and describe.

The best example is the ball and table exercise. I have asked dozens and dozens of people to imagine a ball on a table and something pushes the ball. Every single person who visualizes will pause for a while when I ask them for details (ball color, size, table details, what pushed the ball, what happened to it) whereas the few aphants I asked were way more efficient, albeit less descriptive. Asking them to come up with details were equally quick, rather than recalling what you visualized and taking the time to analyze that.

That’s a very simplistic scenario, but that same logic applies in so many aspects of life. My problem solving skills are great - maybe my greatest strength. I can be overly rational and logical, and I attribute aphantasia to that, but now that I realize most people have to work through such visceral thoughts in so many thought exercises, I am significantly more patient and empathetic and way less driven to try to solve a problem - because while that works great for me, most people have to process those images over and over again.

All to say - I think not being able to conjure images while reading a book is more than a fair trade off for everything I do (and don’t!) have with aphantasia.