Health

What is ‘brain blindness’?


When you close your eyes, what do you see? For me, it’s always been a black screen, sometimes with the stillness of a creaking TV. My dream is a jumble of thoughts, but when I try to recall, I can’t really see anything. I don’t have to pinch myself to see if I’m dreaming, because my dreams are never the same as reality. I have a disease called dementia, mind blindness. I can see clearly with my eyes but not with my mind.

When I think of a memory, I can conceptually understand and answer questions about it, but cannot project it into my mind or imagine myself in it. I hold all the projector slides and have all the information, but can’t see the actual image. Four percent It is estimated that we will experience oversleeping, but we can go our whole lives without knowing we have it.
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I only realized when I was 21 years old, sitting at a coffee shop with my best friend. She spoke enthusiastically about an article she had read about aphantasia and she couldn’t imagine what it would feel like. Suddenly, I realized that I was seeing another world. I’ve always thought dreamy, counting sheep, and picturing yourself on the beach are metaphors. I can’t imagine what the mental image would be like.

After telling my family, we found out that my mother has it too. Apantasia is familial, with search shows that if you have congenital anorexia, there is a 21% chance that your first-degree relative (parent, sibling or child) will also have it. At first, it was hard not to see this as a loss, but over time I developed a new appreciation and interest in how I learn and experience the world.

The concept of aphantasia originated with Aristotle, who described the sixth sense of the visual imagination known as phantasia. Apantasia indicates the absence of mental images, but about 10% to 15% of people at the other end of the spectrum with extremely vivid photographic images or memories, known as hyperphagia. Although knowledge of these invisible differences in perception dates back to 340 BC, both terms are named only by Dr. Adam Zeman, professor of cognitive and behavioral neurology at the University of Exeter in the UK, in 2015.

Mental imagery, as a subject of study, was considered taboo in the second half of the 20th century because behaviorism, refuses to consider introspection as a way to understand behavior. Now, however, “It has been embraced by scientists of all kinds now because we can measure it. People are realizing that we don’t know much about it, and we should,” says Joel Pearson, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

The experience of aphantasia is difficult to describe because it varies from person to person and there is no conscious equivalent. “People say they feel that the image is there but they can’t reach it,” says Zeman. “We know that, in a sense, [people with aphantasia] must have a very detailed knowledge of how things look because [they] can recognize them. All sensory information is in the brain [but they find it] difficult to use that information to create a visual experience without the item. ”

Aphantasia is often described as a visual condition, but it is actually multisensory. People with a lack of mental image may have power reduction to access other mental senses (imagining sounds, movement, smell, taste, and touch). For example, I can’t visualize most of the senses. I can’t imagine the taste of my favorite meal or the feeling of being hugged, but I have a powerful voice and can hear and memorize songs in my mind. This makes me a multisensory person, as I have intellectual impairment in many, but not all, senses.

Some people experience a complete absence of mental senses, which Zeman calls global somnolence. In one The 2020 study was published in Scientific reports, only 26% of aphantasic participants reported no inner spiritual expression, which suggests that most aphantasic people experience a unique combination of other senses. Although people with anorexia share a lack of visual acuity, we cannot assume that everyone has the same experience.

Scientists mainly study aphantasia in terms of visual imagination, rather than other senses, so a lot remains unknown. Even among visualists, people may have completely different experiences — some people have no concept of visual images, but 63% can see vivid images in their dreams. “Most people with aphantasia are fairly confident that they dream visually. It’s just that they’re going through it in an involuntary brain state,” says Zeman.

There are advantages and disadvantages to having aphantasia. People with aphantasia tend to Higher average IQ (115 vs. 110 for the general population) and get Less affected by scary stories because they cannot visualize them. As Zeman explains, “it’s clearly not a threshold for high achievement… You might think it would stifle creativity, but that’s clearly not the case either.”

Aphantasics go through lower levels of sensory sensitivitiesCarla Dance, a doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex in the UK, says “sensory input can be bright lights, loud noises or the smell of perfume more difficult with autobiographical memory and facial recognition.

People may not realize they have anorexia because they have developed shortcuts to how to handle the world. “In visual working memory, we find their performance the same [as the general population]. But once you start to scrutinize and see how people hold this information in memory, it’s a different mechanism and a different strategy, although performance on everyday tasks looks similar. ,” said Pearson. “Most people with aphantasia will have very good spatial skills…but they can’t put any objects in that space.”

At work, in an exercise that explores neurodiversity, my colleagues and I were once asked to draw the brain to visualize how we think, but I couldn’t, because I don’t think in pictures. . I felt frustrated and self-deprecating because there were no alternatives for me to participate — I had to sit and wait while the others finished their assignments. I was reminded of a way in which I was different from others, although I did not want to see it as a weakness. There are many easy ways to deal with this and that includes people who think differently. For example, my colleagues may have orchestrated the exercise from drawing what our mind looks like to simply showing how we think. That way, I can write down a list of words or feelings to explain how the mind works, instead of trying to come up with pictures.

“Aphantasia is just another way to experience the world. It’s about figuring out what learning style you have and what works for you, says Dance, based on your visual profile. “If someone has really good auditory imaging, perhaps [they can use] that meaning as a gateway to remember things. “We can all benefit from taking an in-depth look at how we think and what this tells us about ourselves.



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