Reading Blind

source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2024/03/05/insights-in-the-eyes-of-mice--men/

The title refers to the fact that I don't have a visual mind. Thus, when I read descriptions of places, people, or intricate actions, I'm blind to them. I can't picture them in my mind. This condition is called aphantasia. I can sort of construct scenes that I am familiar with, piece by piece to get a vague impressions of things, but I don't really see an image of it. I just "know" what it looks like. 

I find this not to be a handicap. Though perhaps it is a case of not missing what you never knew. I've been reading for over 6o years and don't recall ever really noticing it - until recently. However, I don't have a good personal memory either, so it is impossible to say with any certainty that I never noticed this before, but I certainly don't recall bemoaning this lack of pictures in my mind as I read. I do know that there are books whose scenes I still remember - but not so much as pictures, but as moods, or as a sense of place that the authors created in the way they described the scene. I suspect, however, that most descriptions were treated like scenes that I "knew" rather than pictured.

This goes for characters as well. I don't really pay attention to how they are described, though I always get a little bored if the author spends too much time describing them and their clothes, since I can't picture or remember how they look them anyway. In real life, the closest I can get to picturing people is a vague recollection of a photograph of them. I can't picture my wife in my head. Weird, I know. And I do picture things in my dreams, which is even weirder.

However, back on topic.

In my recent reading I've been noticing my inability to picture things a lot more. Perhaps part of it is due to my more recent reading. And it isn't so much the scenery, but the action scenes. I just finished a book on the American Civil War - review coming in a month or so - and it included several scenes set in the midst of battles, in which there is a lot this-and-that going on all around the point of view character. Now, there is simply no way all those words were going to make a "movie" in my head to illustrate the scene. And while perhaps, if I read it carefully, I could understand what was happening - these days I find that I don't care. This is the second aspect of what I have noticed. I simply don't have the patience to read all these little details in order to understand what is going on, because, basically I don't care about the process, all I needed to know is the result. So these days, I just skip over action heavy scenes. I skipped over the entire ninja attack in Shogun and I can remember skipping a battle in the Black Tongued Thief.  I know that I'll find out who wins in the end, so I miss nothing important by skipping it. In fact I skim read and skipped probably the final 30 plus pages of The Book That Wouldn't Burn while the heroes were try fleeing a raging fire and an mob or something, because it was just action for action's sake and by that time in the story, I didn't care anymore.

I know that many authors take a great deal of trouble to choreograph their fight, battle, and action scenes, describing in great detail all the sights, sounds, the movements of the character(s), and everyone and everything around them. And in fantasy, there a whole books that are focused on epic battles. But when I read these passages all I read are a jumble of words and sentences. I just get confused, bored, and annoyed. Now this is, of course, on me. I don't think it's a case of my wits having gotten so dull that I couldn't understand what was going on, if I cared to. I just don't care to. Basically action for the sake of action bores me these days. 

What is interesting to me is that I have the impression that many of the books I read in the past did not make any attempt to script movie action-scenes into their books, like today's authors (and perhaps readers) seem to feel necessary these days. I've read the Captain Aubrey naval novels and the Flashman Victorian military novels, and others as well, all of which have battles in them, but I just have the feeling that they didn't choreographed them at such a movie scene granular level. Maybe back in the day they didn't feel the needed to. Maybe because they didn't feel like they were competing against movies and video games. Or maybe that's now what readers expect these days. Do you?

So, in the end, how does aphantasia affect my enjoyment of books? Thinking about it, I don't think it affects my enjoyment at all. I don't miss anything that I decide to skip, and most of the books I have read, and are reading today, don't have these elaborate movie-inspired action sequences, anyway, so I'm not really skipping all that much in the course of my reading. As for scenery, well, I know a lot about the world these days - one way or another I've seen it- so I don't need a lot of hand-holding to get the idea of the setting, which is all I need. But if they toss it in, fine. Maybe it will create a sense of place that I can feel, if not see.

And maybe in the end, all this is why I value clever writing and witty dialog.

   

A Glitch in the Matrix

The Glitch with Static

Last week I may have experienced a glitch in the matrix, at lease in the dream matrix. It went down for a moment.

By way of introduction I should mention that as an old man, I apparently don't need more than 4 or 5 hours of sound sleep a night, and as a consequence I often spend 3 to 5 hours either awake or dozing. I spent these hours thinking about whatever my current writing project is, which is usually boring enough to put me back to sleep. However, being on the borderland of sleep and wakefulness, dreams are sometimes half in sleep and half in (semi) wakefulness. And I was in this borderland one night last week when I experienced the momentary glitch of the matrix. Well, something glitched, anyway.

I was dreaming when suddenly, the "screen" in my dream abruptly, for no reason, when entirely white - with a hiss of static. All I "saw" in my head, in my dream, was whiteness, with a distinct hint of static. This white gap in the dream was so abrupt that it pushed me over the border to wakefulness. It only lasted a second or less before the dream continued on for a bit, but I was awake and consciously aware of it happening, and the strangeness of it happening. I can think of no explanation for it happening, except that something somewhere went "boink" for a second, either in my mind or the matrix. Of that I'm certain. 

I'm not going to seriously propose that there is such a thing as the matrix, or that we are in some simulation, as some scientists propose, that might occasionally go momentarily down. And yet, I find the incident very strange, as I find my dreams. For, you see, my mind is not visual. I can't call up more than a murky approximation of an image in my mind; more like just the knowledge of what it looks like than an actual image. This syndrome is known as aphantasia. The strange thing is that I know that even though I can't recall my dreams in any more detail than the murky images my waking mind can produce, I know that I do see images in my dreams, complicated, full color ones, and my impression is that they can be quite detailed, including the faces of all those strangers I encounter in my dreams... I find this disconnect between my waking mind and my sleeping ones... interesting. And inexplicable. It seems to me that the disconnect between the waking world and the sleeping one for me, at least, is very hard to explain with our current knowledge. I have to believe that we know a lot less about what we think we know than what there is to know. Just say'n.

The writing update promised for today will appear next week, wind and tide permitting.

It Has A Name

The name is aphantasia.

In the blog post where I talked about the failed covers of The Bright Black Sea, I mentioned that I could not picture peoples' faces in my head, or indeed, as I explored my mind more, that I could not picture anything clearly in my head. At best I'd “see” a vague impression, from which I might be able to piece by piece reconstruct an image. For example, I can probably draw a good picture of my house without looking at it, because I “know” what it looks like without actually “seeing” it in my mind, at least not as a complete image.

The reason why I mentioned this in the post was because I had considered a cover with characters on it, and rejected it for two reasons. The first was that I had no clear mental images of my characters. In my writing, you'll find few references to how they look, most are vague and you're free to ignore them, which reflects the fact that I don't have pictures of real people, people I see everyday and/or have known all my life, much less make believe ones. I could, I suppose, make a spread sheet of each character's physical characteristics, tall,/short, blond/black/brown/red hair, etc. and then just plug those features in when writing about that character, but since there appearance isn't important to me, I'd probably never think about doing it anyways.

The upside is that rather than try to compensate for this imaginative gap with a cheat sheet, I just outsource the job to you, my readers. You're free to imagine them anyway you like. Anyway they appear in your mind while reading about them goes. And that being the case, I didn't want to give them any physical appearance on a cover or interior art. They're yours to image.

A few weeks after that post, I came across an article that describes this condition of not being able to see images in one's mind, a condition called aphantasia.

The BBC article is here: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34039054

I suppose there are degrees in every condition. I have no trouble finding my car in a parking lot, and I don't think I would even if it wasn't bright green. (My wife's choice.) I still can find my way around places I've visited in many years. And strangely enough, I'm pretty certain that I dream in fairly images, though that's a bit hard to say, because while I retain the impression of images, I can't recall more than an impression of those images – the condition reasserts itself in my waking mind.

I found this interesting. I had realized long before this article that other people could recall events much more vividly in mind than I could, so the condition itself was no surprise, only that it was a diagnosed condition. I don't see it as any sort of handicap. I'm a painter, after all, and most of my paintings are strictly from “imagination”. While my later acrylics are often impressionistic, my earlier work is much more realistic. (There are a few samples of this style on my DeviantArt site.) In all of them, I wasn't painting from what I could “see” in my mind, so much as taking an impression of a place,/time/mood and then engineering something like it onto the paper or board – and as often as not, into something different than what I set out to paint.

The one downside is that I don't get my money's worth as a tourist. I know I was there, but the only way to relive it, is to look at the photos taken. I can not replay the sights and sounds in my mind over and over again, like other people can. Seeing that I hate to travel, that's no big deal, though I wonder if this inability to relive the experience has something to do with my disinclination to travel. What's the cart, what's the horse? And since I can easily find plenty of photos of everywhere, and view many places on street view, going so place to take pictures, and putting up with all the wear and tear and stress of travel is not worth it.