Describing What You Can’t Imagine

Describing What You Can’t Imagine by Julia Stone

Think of a purple zebra.

Did you visualise a zebra? If so, you can no doubt change the colours around, making it shades of purple, or purple with black stripes, or purple and white?

Or did you think about how it might look but not visualise an image. Possibly you just considered the idea of  “a purple zebra” and read on. 

If you visualised the purple zebra, you are one of the estimated 97% of people who are able to imagine things that are not there in front of their eyes. You are able to create an image in your mind’s eye. It is likely that you can also imagine sounds/voices, maybe physical sensations, tastes and smells.

Aphantasia is the inability to create these imagined senses in your own mind. It has only recently been named and studied; the term was coined in 2015 by Dr Adam Zeman, a professor at the University of Exeter. Most people who have aphantasia go their whole lives without realising that their experience of the world is not the norm. When a guided mediation takes you on an imagined journey, detailing the shadows from leaves in a forest or the feel of warm sand under your feet on a beach, people with aphantasia cannot create these imagined scenarios. At best they may have a concept of the forest or the beach, but they cannot conjure up a detailed image. Many assume that it is a metaphor, not knowing that most people can visualise these things in their mind’s eye.

Zeman refers to it as ‘blind imagination’: the person with aphantasia can answer questions that require the ability to imagine a situation – for example, is the green of grass darker than the green of a pine tree – but they don’t (can’t) visualise to do so. He has studied the brain function of people with aphantasia and neuroimaging data suggest clear differences in the ways they process information. Put very simply, when looking at a real object they use a part of their brain associated with visual data, but when imagining an object they use their verbal brain. 

It was only this year I discovered the term aphantasia, thanks to @aphantasiaclub on Twitter. 

Since my childhood I’ve known that I can’t visualise people – even my partner and close friends/family – although I can describe them in words. I know my mother had dark black/brown, shoulder length hair which she curled up at the ends in metal curlers. She had a pointed nose, thin eyebrows and mid-brown eyes. I know what she looked like but I cannot see her in my mind’s eye.

This inability to visualise can lead to poor facial recognition and I need to meet someone several times before I have ‘got them’. My sister is the same. We once spent a frustrating afternoon watching a French film together, neither of us able to differentiate between the three smoulderingly good-looking, dark haired lead men. One was the brother, another the husband and the third a neighbour, but they were all interchangeable to us.

Similarly places and objects: I have a sense of them more than an image in my mind’s eye. It’s as if they are in my peripheral vision and when turning to look they disappear. I am, however, surprisingly good on spatial location and could tell you which of my friends sat where at lunch months after the event. However, I can’t ‘see’ them and wouldn’t be able to describe what they looked like, what they wore, what was on the table, or anything at all about the surroundings. 

Apparently there are a number of famous creative people who have aphantasia – Wiki lists several fantasy and science fiction writers and illustrators. They have vivid imaginations but they tend to be word-based rather than visual.

As you can imagine (!) it could be a problem when trying to write or draw a character, place or a scene which doesn’t exist. I generally need a point to kick off from: an image that I can actually see that allows me to say ‘no, the windows wouldn’t be there’, or ‘yes, he looks like that, but shorter.’ I hoard information and imagery, poems and photos, song lyrics and drawings, anything that can give me a platform to build from. 

To describe a character in my novels, I think through the key physical characteristics I want my character to have. For example, the therapist in my book Her Little Secret. She is in her 50s and has dark wavy hair. An online search for images of “middle-aged female therapists” helps me find a photo of someone who looks ‘right’. I do the same for environments. For example, I have a sense of the summerhouse Cristina uses as her therapy room but to describe it, I need to find an image that fits. All these pictures go into a note book, each character with their own page. Sometimes I make a collage and pin it on my wall to help me literally see the world I’m creating.

Finally, whilst some people adore rich descriptive scenes, you can imagine that people with aphantasia may not be as keen as they cannot ‘see’ or sense it. So when you next read a novel which has sparse description, or is primarily dialogue, it might be worth pondering whether this is a stylistic choice or suggests something more about the author!

More info on aphantasia can be found at www.aphantasia.com.

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Julia Stone’s debut novel, Her Little Secret, was published by Orion-Dash summer 2021.

Julia has had a long career in business psychology. Following cancer treatment, she decided to take a break from the business world and direct her energies towards her creative side, studying art and ceramics, then film script and novel writing. She now runs her own coaching and therapy business part-time, where she helps other creative people work on the emotional challenges and limiting beliefs that get in the way of their writing or artistic ambitions. 

Julia attended Faber Academy in 2017. She has been shortlisted for a number of writing competitions and in 2018 won The Blue Pencil First Novel award. Having a background in psychology and psychotherapy, it’s only natural that she writes psychological suspense novels!

She lives on a small holding in Suffolk with her partner and varying numbers of ducks, muntjac and rabbits.

Find out more about her on her website,  https://JuliaStoneWriter.com

Follow her on Twitter,  https://twitter.com/JulesTake3

You can purchase Her Little Secret here, https://amzn.to/3DvuCkR

HER LITTLE SECRET

His therapist. Their love affair. Her Little Secret.

Cristina knows all about boundaries. As a therapist, it is vital that she keeps her clients at a professional distance.

Enter new client Leon: educated, charming, affluent — and newly bereaved, following the death of his married lover, Michelle. Cristina soon learns that Leon has an ulterior motive for approaching her: Michelle was one of her clients, and Leon is desperate for her insights into the woman he loved.

Moved by the depth of his feelings, Cristina is drawn to help him through his grief. But as she struggles to ignore her own growing attraction to sophisticated, attentive Leon, her boundaries start to blur and then collapse, and the two embark on their own clandestine love affair.

But why does Leon switch so quickly from charm to criticism, attentiveness to distance? Can anyone truly be as perfect as he paints his beloved Michelle to have been, and what is hidden inside of her off-limits therapy file? Torn between her conscience and curiosity, Cristina is about to discover the truth is far beyond anything she could have imagined…

For fans of You, Before I Go to Sleep and Obsession, Her Little Secret is an utterly chilling new psychological thriller about obsessive love and the danger of crossing lines.

 

 

 

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