Ask Lemmy

I don't have aphantasia and I don't particularly fancy any medium over the other, but what I often miss is sound. Music is a whole different language to either visual or conceptual as conveyed by words, whereas imagery to me feels the most direct and laziest, music can convey feelings there are neither words nor imagery for, and so often I like adaptations of written works for injecting some fitting music, and will listen to fitting music as I read books.

I really enjoy reading, but I can't picture a scene, or what characters look like. It can be a bit confusing at times, but doesn't usually take away from the enjoyment.

As an example, my favourite sci fi author Randolph Lalonde (great independent author, buy his books 👍) had a scene in a recent book where some characters had a shootout in a warehouse that held several spaceships. The ships were all at least a few metres long, so the warehouse was huge. In my head, everything was centred on a small area around the characters, and I could sort of picture them being within a few feet of each other.

I couldn't picture any details, it was as if he had written that 'the man stood near the woman, and pointed the gun towards the crates', even though the scene was well written with good descriptions. My brain couldn't translate the description into a layout in my head.

I still really enjoyed the scene, but every now and then it was as if my brain realised that things should be further apart, or one character should be taller than another, for example.

Details in books and written media as a list, not a series of images. Loved reading as a kid, dropped off when I spent more time doing other things, like cpmouter gaming.

The upside is that witthout a mental picture of characters any close enough visual take on the character will work for me. I also have ADHD so small details are likely forgotten and only the prominent ones that the character is defined by are going to be weird if mkssed.

For example when I heard Idris Elba was going to be cast as Roland in The Dark Tower it was a big positive because he seemed like someone that would be able to oull off the personality of the character and I was only concerned about whether they would do a good job with the missing fingers or drop it entirely as missing fingers was a big part of Roland's character for me. Yeah I know there was something involving race in the books, but that plotline was something that didn't seem to be necessary to carry over into a movie.

Of course the movie ended up being a pile of trash, but is a good example of how I focus more on how the character acts than how they look.

Same with a lot of science, swords, and other objects where I really don't have a mental image so a lot of sets work as long as they have the things or the general feel.

Didn’t have it for most of my life, but briefly had it, along with some memory issues. It made understanding what I was reading nigh on impossible. Any lengthy descriptions fell through my memory near instantly, as I had no practice in maintaining a purely conceptual memory of a piece of writing. On reflection, I’m terribly impressed with those who manage to deal with the absence of an audiovisual imagination to compress information.

Completely. Books are only good to me if the author has a nice writing style. Those character descriptions or scene description paragraphs? I just skip them. They don't do anything for me.

On the other hand, I LOVE movies.

Itt, people that can visualise but think that not constantly visualising everything they read means they have the superpower to "feel words as concepts"