Revelations

An essay by Katie Herzog

We’re on summer break/our international tour for the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, here’s an essay Katie couldn’t find anyone else to publish.

If it weren’t for the dog, I might never have known there was something wrong with my brain. 

The realization came at what had become a near-daily dinner date at my parents’ house while my wife Janna and I remodeled our own house nearby. We’d bought it sight unseen a few months before, shortly after our realtor gave us a tour via a fuzzy FaceTime connection and said the magic words: “in your budget.” 

The house, it turned out, was a bit of a dump, or, in real estate lingo: “charming.” It smelled like decades of unwashed laundry and the floors and walls were so wavy I felt like I’d taken a small amount of acid every time I looked around. Plus, the deck was a lawsuit waiting to happen; there was a stump in the crawlspace that seemed to be keeping the house up; there was a bear living on the land that enjoyed dragging our neighbor’s trash through our yard and distributing it throughout the woods; and the kitchen needed a full remodel. So we got to work. Or one of us did. While Janna demoed sherbert-orange cabinets, shopped for appliances, and turned our living room into a makeshift kitchen with a folding table and hot plate, I watched videos of other people remodeling their homes and called it “research.” 

With the kitchen demolished, we ate a lot of dinners at my parents’ house, and because we are good parents ourselves, we always brought our own child: a four-year-old goldendoodle named Moose. 

Moose is the one percent of dogs. He sleeps not just on our bed but with his head on a pillow. While other dogs may be the descendants of wolves, Moose is about as far from wild as you can get. He’s been genetically engineered to be adorable, and from the day Janna and I paid the ransom and rescued him from a breeder we found on Craigslist, I was absolutely smitten with this dog. I immediately became one of those people, a (gross) dog mom, the type of person who calls her dog her “child” and assumes he’s invited to dinner.

And so, one night at dinner at my parents’ house, as Moose slept under the table, looking up at me every once in a while with golden brown eyes straight out of a Disney movie, I idly wondered aloud if dogs have memories. Or does Moose live entirely in the moment, I wondered, like the highest order Zen Buddhist? 

My dad—a scholar of human-animal relationships and the author of the book Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals—thought about it for a moment and said, in short, maybe. He certainly has memories of people and places. You can see that every time he freaks out on the walk to the park. The question is, does he have memories for events? 

That, my dad didn’t know, but this evolved into a conversation about different ways of thinking, and my dad mentioned a writer named Joshua Foer who won the World Memory Championship in 2006. The contest involves memorizing dozens of names, faces, numbers, and words in a matter of minutes, and Foer set a new record by memorizing an entire deck of cards sorted at random in less than two minutes. Foer wasn’t a savant; he didn’t have any special abilities. He simply trained himself to associate words (or numbers) with images, like a visual mnemonic, and then, when it was time to recall, he visualized the images in his mind. 

“Wait,” I said. “What do you mean, ‘visualized the images’?”

Everyone blinked and looked at me like I’d just grown a couple of devil horns out of my forehead. 

“He pictures them. In his mind.” 

“That’s just a metaphor,” I said. “Right?” 

Apparently not. Everyone, it seemed, could see actual pictures in their minds without even trying. Everyone, that is, except me. 

“Picture an apple,” my mom said. 

I closed my eyes. All I saw was the back of my eyelids. 

My family immediately started taunting me. My dad described his apple in minute detail. It had little white spots on it, he said. And a stem. My mom said her apple was as clear as a photo. My nephew said his apple was green. Janna said her apple was in a bowl on a table. She could make it twirl in the air if she wanted. She could make a pie out of it. 

Were these people fucking with me? It wouldn’t be the first time. I needed a second opinion, so I texted my twin sister in Colorado. “Do you see pictures in your head?” I asked. “Like in your mind?”

“Yes.” She texted back. “Duh.” 

I told her to ask her kids. 

“Yeah, everyone can see pictures in their heads,” she responded. “Can you not? Wtf?”

What the fuck was right. It was as though I’d just found out that my entire family could fly if they flapped their arms fast enough while I was down here crawling. Could the goddamn dog see pictures in his mind too? I was shook.

I spent the rest of the evening googling and quickly came across the word aphantasia. The Cleveland Clinic defined it as a lack of visual imagination and added that many people aren’t even aware they have it. But, they said, as if trying to reassure me, “it’s not a disability or medical condition.” 

The hell it’s not, I thought. Everyone else around me could see fucking pictures and I’m over here trying to conjure a Red Delicious in my brain like I’m the Johnny the blind Appleseed. I might not be in a wheelchair but I sure as shit have a disability of the imagination. I wondered if I could get Moose certified as a service animal and wished I could go back to before, when I was blissfully unaware that the “mind’s eye” is real and that I didn’t have one. 

That night I dreamed about apples. They were so vivid, with little white dots on them. I could see them almost as clear as a photo. When I woke up, they were gone.

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Every article about aphantasia—and by now I’ve read all of them—mentions that it wasn’t formally named until 2015 but it was described at least as far back as 1880 by the scholar Francis Galton. 

Galton wrote that when he asked members of the general public if they could see images in their minds, they said yes. “Many men and a yet larger number of women, and many boys and girls, declared that they habitually saw mental imagery, and that it was perfectly distinct to them and full of color,” he wrote. And yet, when Galton asked his scientist friends if they saw mental images, most not only didn’t have this invisible mind’s eye, they were skeptical that it existed at all. 

“They had no more notion of its true nature than a color-blind man who has not discerned his defect has of the nature of color,” Galton wrote. I knew how they felt. 

Over a century later, in 2010, researchers in the UK led by the neuroscientist Adam Zeman published an article in Discover about a 65-year-old patient who lost the ability to visualize after undergoing a medical procedure to clear blocked arteries. After publication, they heard from 21 people who hadn’t lost the ability to visualize; rather, they’d never had it at all. 

The researchers followed up, gave these 21 subjects a survey called the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire, and found they had “reduced or absent voluntary imagery.” There should be a term for this, the researchers thought, and proposed aphantasia, or the analog to phantasia, an extremely dull Disney movie as well as the term ancient Greeks used for “visual imagination.” It fits. 

There is no formal medical diagnosis for aphantasia, but the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire is easily available online. I took it through the Aphantasia Network, an organization and website founded by one of those first 21 subjects. 

The survey asks you to visualize a person you see often. I closed my eyes and tried to conjure Janna. I know she has brown hair, bangs, and a frequently bemused look on her face when I’m speaking, but I couldn’t actually see her in my mind. I clicked a box that read, “No image at all, you only ‘know’ that you are thinking of the object.” The same was true when I tried to visualize, as the quiz instructed, a rising sun, a shop I often frequent, and a country scene including trees, mountains, and a lake. I couldn’t see them, exactly, but I knew they were in my mind nonetheless. 

On a score of one to five, I was a zero. 

I asked Janna to take the same survey. If the test had been graded, she would have received an A+. According to the questionnaire, she may be a hyperphantasiac, which means she has a “highly visual imagination,” and “can imagine scenes, colors, and feelings so clearly it’s almost like they’re real.” 

It made sense. Janna has an extremely lucid imagination and a propensity to get lost in thought. She’s a daydreamer, and can play whole scenes in her mind. As for how accurate those scenes are, that’s another question, and she does occasionally have wild memories of things that just didn’t happen. Just a few days before, she’d casually mentioned the time that the two of us went to a “queer prom” we saw advertised on a marquee outside a theater in Seattle, and, according to her, discovered upon entry that it was an actual school prom. Like, for teenagers.

I stopped her. “In what possible world do you think I would have agreed to attend any kind of prom, much less a queer one?” I said, mystified as to where this“memory came from. I hadn’t danced in public since middle school. I would never agree to go to a dance. 

“It happened,” she said. “I can picture it. We were there.”

“What, in your imagination, did I wear to this prom?” I asked.

She thought for a second. “A suit,” she said. “You wore a black suit with a silver vest.”

“And where is this suit now?” I asked her. 

She glanced over at the closet. No suit. “You must have borrowed it.”

“This did not happen,” I told her. “We joked about going to the queer prom. We didn’t actually go. You are imagining this.” 

She conceded that I was probably right. But, she said, “You should wear that suit more often. It looked great.” 

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By this point, it was clear to me that visual imagery exists on a continuum, with me on one side of it (the losing side) and Janna on the other, and most people somewhere in between. But there’s some debate over whether aphantasia is an actual condition or just a normal human variation. There’s also debate over how important the ability to visualize is at all. 

While the inability to visualize might seem integral to the human experience to those who can do it, there are plenty of successful aphantasiacs, including in highly creative fields. For example: Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar and an animator himself. Catmull has said that he first realized he had no internal mind’s eye when attempting Tibetan meditation, which involves intense visualization. He couldn’t do it, and, realizing there was something different about his brain, he started surveying his colleagues and found a surprising number of them were also unable to visualize. And these people were artists and animators. If they can succeed without a mind’s eye, how important can it be? 

Still, despite taking some minor solace in the success of well-known aphantasiacs (including, apparently, the painter Chuck Close, the writer John Green, and the neurologist Oliver Sacks), I was sad about it. How could I not be? I was missing out on something that sounded not just normal but pretty damn cool. I’d close my eyes, trying to force even the outline of an apple onto the back of my eyelids, but no matter how much I focused, I saw only static. I thought maybe a simple shape would be easier—a bright, white triangle, perhaps—but no matter how much I tried, there was nothing but dark. 

I hoped maybe an expert could help so I contacted Sophie Scott, a British scientist who studies cognition. Scott is a big deal. She’s a Fellow of the British Academy and a Commander of Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, which sounds like something out of Star Trek but I’m told is quite the honor. She also happens to be an aphantasiac herself, which she discovered as a student in the late ’80s. During a psychology course, the class was told to visualize a bus. She couldn’t do it. Considering her accomplishments, this does not seem to have held her back much, although she told me that it has impacted her in some ways. For one, she can’t draw. 

Art was also on the list of skills that eluded me. While I can draw okay if I’m looking directly at something (and even won the school art award in eighth grade, my second proudest accomplishment after potty-training myself six months before my twin sister), what I cannot do is create. I cannot make images from scratch. I can recreate them only from photos or real life. When I close my eyes, they disappear.  

I started thinking about all the hidden ways my inability to visualize may have affected my life. I’m a terrible fiction writer, completely unable to imagine worlds beyond my senses. I can’t play an instrument to save my life, not even the recorder. Meditation has always been impossible, no matter how many yoga classes I go to. Same with any kind of movement routine. Janna once dragged me to a Zumba class wearing an XXXL Hawaiian shirt because, she told me, it was “Zumba culture.” She must have imagined this because everyone else wore normal t-shirts and leggings and I stood in the back row for 20 minutes trying to follow along before taking a water break and sneaking out. Was my inability to Zumba a symptom too?

And, of course, there was design. Here I was, trying to remodel a goddamn house when I couldn’t even picture one in my head. I began staring at the walls of our new house, trying to imagine shelving or built-in bookcases, like I’d seen on Instagram. Board and batten were big that season. Would that look good in my house? I had no idea. I quite literally could not picture it. 

As for what causes this particular affliction, brain imaging studies of people with aphantasia have found abnormally weak connections between the parts of the brain responsible for vision and the prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for, among other things, executive function and decision-making. 

But as for why some of us have these weak connections—and researchers estimated between 1 and 5 percent of the population lack the ability to visualize—no one knows for sure. For some aphantasiacs (including researcher Adam Zeman’s early subject, the man who found he could not visualize after a medical procedure) it’s an acquired trait. But for those of us who seem to have been born with it, there’s no clear cause, it does run in families. “If you have aphantasia,” Zeman said in a 2001 interview, “the chances that your first-degree relatives will have aphantasia are raised by about tenfold.” The next step in the research is isolating which genes may be involved. 

Regardless of the cause, aphantasia makes clear that cognition varies by individual and there is considerable diversity in how people think. I, for one, have a strong inner monologue, a constantly chattering narrator that is so omnipresent in my brain that I cannot imagine life without it (of course, I can’t imagine much). Much to my surprise, this experience, it turns out, isn’t universal. Some people have no narrator at all. Others, including Sophie Scott, have music constantly playing in their heads. The music in their minds can be so vivid that it’s difficult to tell if a song is playing on the radio or if it’s just in their brains. 

“Consciousness scientists get very excited about perception,” Scott told me. “What we experience of the world is always the brain’s best guess at what’s out there. But it’s also the case that many of our experiences of thought and imagery do not strongly impact the basic elements of cognition. People who have had severe strokes that rob them of language also lose their internal monologue, but they can still solve math problems, logic problems, etc. Which raises the problem of, what on earth is consciousness for?”

Sophie is a brain scientist. She finds all of this fascinating and wasn’t upset to realize she lacks the ability to see pictures in her head. But I was. The list of things I couldn’t do kept growing. I could never picture myself having kids and so I didn’t have any. I could never picture myself getting married either. Is this why I’m gay? I thought, Because I couldn’t picture myself with a husband? Then I remembered what happened the one time I tried to date a man and concluded picturing it probably wasn’t the issue. 

The thing that most upset me, however, wasn’t all the skills I’d never master or the blandness of my own inner life; it was what this meant for my memory. 

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In 2022, Andrea Blomkvist, a postdoc at the London School of Economics, published a paper arguing that aphantasia should really be thought of as multisensory impairment rather than just visual impairment. 

Her evidence for this is that half of aphantasiacs also report issues with other types of imagination. They (we) can’t, for instance, evoke the smell of lemons at will. The same is true of sounds: half of us can’t conjure songs in our minds either. This, Blomkvist, writes, indicates that aphantasia is really an issue not just of visualization but of recall, and studies show that aphantasiacs report diminished autobiographical memory. 

That’s what really worried me. And it explained some things. 

I have very few distinct memories of childhood (or adolescence or young adulthood or even this week, for that matter). Those I do have are usually based not on actual memories but on photos. My life, when I think back on it, isn’t even a blur. It’s just a feeling. I can remember facts: I know the name of my elementary school, who my best friends and favorite teachers were, but I can’t picture any of them, and if asked to recall specific incidents from my youth, I’ve got almost nothing. 

It makes sense. Just like Joshua Foer used images to conjure random chains of cards at the World Memory Championships, most people use visual imagery to reinforce their own memories. I can’t do that. I’ve always assumed my poor memory was a by-product of the copious amounts of marijuana I’ve ingested over my life, but when I read Blomkvist’s paper, I realized it might just be how my brain works. This was not exactly comforting. Pot, I can quit. But that doesn’t mean I’ll start to remember. 

And that’s what gets me. I want to be able to look back at my life and remember what Janna looks like covered in dust while retiling our bathroom floor. I want to close my eyes and see Moose snoring on his side, one arm stretched out above him and one leg popped open for a belly rub even as he’s asleep. I want my life to flash before my eyes before I die. I want that final scene. But it’s probably just going to be dark. 

There had to be a way to fix this problem. So I turned to the internet. 

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There is, of course, a robust community for aphantasiacs online. You can find them on Twitter, on TikTok, on YouTube, and naturally, on Reddit. 

The subreddit r/aphantasia has over 65,000 members (or, as they call them, “non-visualizers”). They post articles, discuss their own experiences, debate causes (childhood trauma is a popular explanation, albeit not one backed up by empirical evidence), and, most importantly for my purposes, try to figure out a way out of the darkness.

While some non-visualizers insist there’s no cure and anyone peddling one is a grifter, others on the forum insist they’ve been able to train themselves to visualize. One oft-mentioned technique is called “image streaming,” and it involves rubbing your eyes and focusing on blobs and shapes that start to appear behind your eyelids. You describe them aloud, in as much detail as possible, and within weeks, or maybe even days, you’ll start to develop a mind’s eye. 

It sounded silly, but, hell, I thought, what’s the worst that could happen? 

After three days of dutifully rubbing my eyes and describing the blotches, something did happen. I was in my backyard, throwing a ball for Moose, and out of the corner of my left eye, I saw a white flash. Our property is overrun by rabbits and I thought one must have run just out of sight. But then, a few minutes later, the same thing happened. And a few minutes later, again. Throughout the day, at seemingly random moments, this white flash would, just for a second, obscure my peripheral vision. I couldn’t control or induce it. It just happened, and then was gone. Was this a visualization? Or was it a brain tumor? I made an emergency appointment with my eye doctor. 

Turns out, it was neither. Rather, a small membrane called the vitreous gel was sloughing off my retina. The doctor said this was common, a natural if freaky part of aging, and while it probably was not caused by my daily eye rubbing regimen (which he found very amusing), he said that continuing to rub my eyes may increase the chances of retinal detachment, which, in turn, could lead to blindness. Image streaming was out. 

Next, I turned to YouTube. Most of the how-to-visualize videos contained some variation of “try hard enough and eventually you’ll get it.” Some had extra tips, like focusing on your forehead rather than the back of your eyelids, drawing a lot, thinking of your mind’s eye like a muscle that needs to be worked, etc. But the overarching theme was just. . . try long and hard enough and maybe it will come to you. Or maybe it won’t.

This was not what I wanted to hear. Never one to take the long way when a shortcut is possible, I started looking into hypnosis, psychedelics, and even electroconvulsive therapy. Turns out, it’s pretty hard to find a doctor willing to shock your brain just because you’re jealous that other people can see pictures and you can’t. Internet doctors, however, are less picky, and I was about to shell out $1,000 for a ketamine prescription from an internet naturopath, but decided first to turn to the experts and emailed Adam Zeman, the guy who named the thing, to ask if there was a cure. 

He said no. In fact, he said, “Aphantasia is not a disorder, rather a variation in human experience, so treatment might not be an appropriate term or goal here.” 

I disagree. 

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So there’s no proven treatment, at least not yet, but I’m still doing my visualization exercises in the hopes that someday the white flash will be my imagination rather than my vitreous gel sloughing off. 

So far my mind’s eye continues to be elusive, so I’m using some workarounds to address the memory deficits. I started photographing and videotaping everything, like a paparazzo in my own home. I figure that even if I’m not great at visualizing scenes or retaining memories, I do have a memory machine in my pocket. I try to get Janna in on it too. “Moose is peeing like a girl!” I’ll shout at her on our walk. “It’s so cute! Take a pic!” She sighs, and takes out her phone.

I’ve started journaling, too. Nothing serious, just a few lines before bed about my day. “Solved Thursday crossword. Only cheated once. Okay, twice. Walked in the woods with Moose. Ate half a cheesecake. Regretted eating half a cheesecake.” There might not be a movie playing back at the end of my life, but at least I’ll have a book to refer to, albeit a pretty dull one. 

I’m also trying to focus on the positives. Optimism isn’t my nature but it really could be worse. My brain does work alright, even if I’m missing out on the pictures. I’m able to write, to work, to help paint the house although I’m bad at picking out colors. Plus, I’ve got Janna, my daydreamer, my home-builder, my hyperphantasiac. She’s got enough imagination for the both of us. Or that’s what I tell myself. 

One night at home, a few weeks after discovering what I lack, I paused for a moment and looked around. The house was in shambles, with holes in the drywall, no sink in the bathroom, and a fridge stuck in the corner of our makeshift living room/kitchen. But there was a fire in the fireplace, Janna was lying on the couch, book in hand, and Moose was sprawled by her feet, one arm straight up, one leg popped, waiting for a belly rub in his sleep. I tried to commit it to memory, knowing it was fruitless and this scene, like all the others, would disappear as soon as I closed my eyes. But, I thought, it’s exactly what I’ve always imagined. And I meant it.