Why I suspect I’d make a lousy Tibetan Buddhist meditator
[ by Charles Cameron — where the blind spot of aphantasia meets the beauty of Avalokiteshvara ]
.
**
Perhaps sadly, perhaps not, I suffer from aphantasia.
It’s a great relief, actually, to have found someone who doesn’t laugh at me when I say I can’t visualize — a researcher, no less, Prof. Adam Zeman, with a paper on the topic in Cortex.
I have tried on occasion to find metaphors for my condition. The best way to explain what does happen when someone asks me to visualize something is to say I can see it “as if painted in water on glass” — or “as if it’s behind me, out of sight, but I can remember roughly what it was like when I last looked.”
Sources:
Lion’s Roar, Developing Pure Perception Through Visualization BBC Science news, Aphantasia: A life without mental images University of Exeter, Can’t count sheep? You could have aphantasia Adam Zeman, Lives without imagery – Congenital aphantasia
May 18th, 2016 at 9:12 pm
Suffer? I was going to congratulate you. Who cares about counting sheep.
You may be blind in the mind’s eye, but you have full faculty of the eye of the soul.
May 19th, 2016 at 1:37 am
Not to belittle your condition. If it is a burden, I’m sorry. I have the opposite problem where I have to concentrate my attention away from too many stray visualizations. I’m constantly trying meditation, physical exercise, fishing, etc. to clear my mind.
May 19th, 2016 at 8:28 am
True, there have been occasions when it’s frustrated me, but not very often — mostly, I just take it for granted. So no need to worry about belittling my suffering, suffering was just a word for “having a condition” in this case.
.
Lion’s Roar, the Buddhist news page, has invited me to write it up in a little more detail, so I’ll save further remarks for that occasion, and post a link here for any who are interested.
Go well, stay well, my friend.
May 19th, 2016 at 3:31 pm
Interesting, Charles.
.
I have always “seen” things internally in abstract _structural_ terms, often as “the patterned evolution of architecture through space and time” (as applied to musical phrasing, woodworking design, or societal dynamics). After reading this post, I now suspect that that this is because, like you, I don’t (or can’t) “visualize” them in the strict sense of internally recreating a visual picture.
.
Fascinating.
.
Off to explore the links next.