This is not a recent article, but I only read it a few weeks ago and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

I’m still reeling from this. I had actually had a conversation prior to this with someone who can’t picture things in his mind, but I don’t think I fully bought into it…I assumed it was more difficult for him to do so, or the images were less realistic, but not that they DIDN’T EXIST.

Taste and smell – or my mind’s tongue and my mind’s nose, if you will – are more difficult for me to conjure up, but I can do it with all of the senses.

I had to stop and consider what I do when I’m teaching a student reading – because usually I’m asking what they’re picturing in their mind, or what concrete images they can visualize…but what if they can’t?

Somewhere in the midst of following this condition, aphantasia, around the internet, I happened on the Wikipedia page for synesthesia…which makes sense because in a crude way, synesthesia is the opposite of aphantasia. I’ve been reading about synesthesia since I was young – I’m pretty sure I requested and received The Man Who Tasted Shapes for Christmas when I was 13 – but had never encountered all of the subtypes of synesthesia. The types that are commonly discussed, the ones that come to mind when you hear about synesthesia, are these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia#Mirror-touch_synesthesia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromesthesia

Maybe you have a different experience, but those are the two phenomena that I’ve heard about when I’ve heard about synesthesia, much like the way OCD is portrayed in movies and TV is almost always as obsessive handwashing or lightswitch flicking, which aggravates me even though I can see those lend themselves better to a visual medium.

So it was the first time I saw these included (ignore auditory tactile, though I don’t think I’d heard much about it either):

…and thought, OH, that’s what I’ve been trying to describe to people when I talk about how the number line looks in my head or how the months of the year seem to be spread out at an angle across my childhood home’s front lawn. I always thought my experience of the number line/years of the centuries/calendar/alphabet was particular, but not remarkable (and I still don’t think it is, at least not in the way that tasting shapes would be), but now I’m questioning everything I know about how our minds diverge, like I’m back to be seven years old and wondering if your green is really my green.

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