alt Hacker NewsI was in college before I realized this wasn’t a universal thing. 15 years later I was finally exposed to the bit where some people don’t have an inner monologue or a minds eye.
I wonder if they’re related.
I was in college before I realized this wasn’t a universal thing. 15 years later I was finally exposed to the bit where some people don’t have an inner monologue or a minds eye.
I wonder if they’re related.
Hello from the other side!
I was about 45 before I realised that when people said “in my mind’s eye” it was substantially more than a metaphor.
And it wasn’t until about a year later that I realised that I also didn’t have what ordinary people refer to as an inner monologue.
Realising that I had both aphantasia and anendophasia was quite a shock, but has never felt to me like I was missing anything.
For images I literally have nothing “pictorial” or “graphical” at all, but concepts and relationships are “vivid”. And for the inner monologue, there’s no autonomic voice at all, but if I concentrate in the same way that someone might “consciously breathe” I can kinda sorta trigger something.
Interestingly, in periods where I have meditated for >20min per day for consecutive weeks, I can trigger what I refer to as “flyover mode” which is like a literal landscape flyover that feels like a 4K screensaver. But this is _rare_ and requires a huge amount of effort.
Weird, eh!?