KnightOfCups wrote: ↑Tue Aug 30, 2022 5:18 pmI have been noticing this become more and more common a thing people say, and it seemed like it was fairly new?
It should be obvious I am fascinated by the way people's brains work, and how differently they do, but hearing "aphantasia" makes it sound like a disorder, so it's honestly thrown me for a loop. I had thought that the word itself was something clinical-- an actual disability that effects brain function-- as opposed to "I don't think in pictures."
Your post was helpful, b/c I didn't realize it's just the same thing (ish) with different words.
I know there's value in having names for things, and I love to label my own bullshit, but this one has been super confusing to me.
I dislike pathologizing variance in human brains.
YEAH.
That's exactly the problem, is that people hear that and think it's some kind of disorder, and the people talking about having it talk about it like it's some kind of disorder. That they are missing something by having a different mode of thought.
There are people who will argue that "aphantasia" refers to not having any mode of thought, of having no internal experience, and I have thoughts about that but the primary and most relevant of them is that this is not how the term is used. All of the studies on it are focusing on it as a lack of visual thinking, the vast majority of people who talk about it are talking about it from a reference point of not being able to picture things in their mind. And it sucks.
