Aphantasia - its a thing you didn't know you and others can/cannot do.

Maybe we should talk about brain stuff. Several days ago, I saw something odd on Youtube. It was this video from this artist talking about a newly named/discovered disorder/ thing called Aphantasia. I'm watching along with the video, and I'm going "Visualization is a metaphor for thinking about something. Wait, that shit isn't metaphorical?" All of a sudden, it feels like this is a thing I likely get to deal with.. Yay. Now, anyone who knows me would agree on my thoughts on self diagnosis. "DON'T" But, what if you are absolutely sure that you have a thing you to need to deal with? "NOPE, Let a doctor do it." That arm looks gangrenous. "Lets go to the hospital, no I have no idea what it is."

Short answer is that WebMD will literally make you a hypochondriac if you're not careful. I don't need that.


So, lets get to some nitty gritty. Aphantasia is a disorder syndrome condition (per Wikipedia), where people who deal with it cannot form mental images/sounds etc. How much and which senses are effected changes from person to person, with mental images being the most likely to be missing. The most interesting/frustrating thing about this is the difficulty in testing this. Since everything about this happens inside each persons own mind, it is extremely difficult to verify that people are actually having this as a problem and that it is not a "what color is red?" philosophy problem. But, turns out that someone has developed a way to test for this and is currently working through proving that it does/does not exist.

That's why it has gotten a real name after a study done in 2015. But it is still not a recognized condition in the DSM currently, and that takes a while. So, to wrap this back around a bit. I very likely have this, but I refuse to self diagnose. There is a very good chance that the only practicing doctor/scientist who could really diagnose me is in the UK and thus unavailable. This is one of those things makes me just be super annoyed at my brain. My biggest fear is about not being able to trust in my brain/ thoughts and the information coming in through my senses. So every time I get a thing where my brain isn't doing something the same as most people's, it tends to freak me out a bit. Luckily, the things my brain does different have so far been proven to be more of the wired differently, and not something that should ever be fixed. Don't want to, don't need to.

Doesn't stop me from thinking about all the shit that isn't actually metaphorical like I thought. Apparently people can acutally count sheep! What the eff.