When you start talking about your aphantasia, people ask you a lot of questions. And you start asking yourself questions too. In this post and the ones that follow, I will try to answer these questions as honestly as possible. A little tour “Inside Frédéric Consavela's head,” so to speak...
Really?
One of the first questions people ask you is, “But surely you can see your parents, can't you?” Well, no! Not at all! I can't see my parents or anyone else in my family, let alone my friends or strangers I've met briefly. It's impossible for me to mentally recreate anyone's face. When I think of my mother, who died in 2004, I have a lot of memories: her infinite love and affection, the phrases she often used, her character, her great qualities, her little flaws, her gait, her accomplishments, her regrets—in short, a whole series of things that characterized her in my eyes, but... no features, no image of her. Fortunately, photography exists and my mind can rely on these “visual crutches.”
But as usual, I can only see what's right in front of me. These photos don't allow me to see her move, for example. Nor can I position myself around her: if it's a photo from the front, she remains facing forward, in 2D. If it's from behind, well, I can't see her face. If we only see her face, I can't visualize her as a whole person. On that note, when, in a movie, a character in the house of their deceased mother (wife, child, father) remembers them almost like in a video, sees them going about their daily activities as if they were alive, I always believed until now that it was just a movie-making trick. That the filmmaker was showing us that the character was remembering the deceased person, but that it was just a trick. I now understand that many people have this kind of mental experience with varying degrees of clarity. For me, it's just crazy, and I don't think I'd like it (I can't be sure, having never experienced it).
To recognize
“Okay, okay, but then how can you recognize your loved ones, your children, your friends, if you don't have mental images of them?” Even if it's hard to understand, it's not the same thing at all. I have a lot of information, immediately available, about the people I regularly interact with: I know, for example, whether they are tall or short, blond, brunette, or redheaded, their gender, the color of their eyes, their voice, their gait, their smile, etc. So when I see them in person or in a video/photo, I recognize them instantly. Where you might conjure up an image of the person, I can gather together in less than a millisecond all the information I have stored about them. Nothing visual, but as soon as I see them, everything else comes to me, without effort, just like you...
Or not...
How to contradict yourself from one paragraph to the next, or almost. Some people suffer from prosopagnosia, also known as “face blindness.” This means that they cannot even recognize the faces of their loved ones. That's not my case, but... I've always been amazed by people who can recognize and name someone they talked to for ten minutes five years ago. For my part, I am capable of not recognizing someone I spoke to for half an hour two days ago. Because, according to the same principle, I haven't stored enough non-visual information that would allow me to truly recognize the person. At best, I may have a vague feeling of déjà vu, but most of the time, nothing at all, nada!
This has often been a problem for me, as people are convinced that I am arrogant or too full of myself to bother greeting them. And I understand them! When you go to see a guy in concert several times in a row, you've exchanged a few words with him on several occasions, and then one day he walks right past you without even acknowledging you, it must be really upsetting. I apologize to everyone who has experienced this with me, but it's really not my fault. I'm not dismissive, I don't think I'm “from Jupiter's tight,”, it's just that I don't recognize you. I can't help it. Period. Gilles, the drummer I play with, has regularly told me about how annoyed some people are about this. He also often talks to me about other musicians we've jammed with, whose names mean nothing to me. And I know very well that if images popped into my mind, I would at least know that I had seen them before and I might be able to put a name to that image.
Impression
So, to sum up, I don't have a mental image of anyone; photos and videos are my friends. That doesn't stop me from recognizing people, but I need to have enough information in store to do so. Or the encounter must have had a profound impact on me, so that I was literally impressed: the person left an impression, was imprinted on my mind.
To be continued in the next posts...
