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What It Is Like to Have Aphantasia and No Inner Monologue

When I close my eyes there is no image, and when I think there is no voice. What is left is not emptiness. It is feeling, concepts, and a strong sense of direction.

Panel one: a young East Asian man with short straight black hair sits in an armchair with his eyes closed, and ONE completely empty thought bubble rises directly above his head, its trail touching his head. Panel two: the same man sits on a park bench beside a friend; the friend's head has ONE thought bubble crowded with tangled, busy scribbled squiggle lines like a noisy chattering inner voice (abstract scribbles only, no letters), while the East Asian man beside him sits calm and peaceful with NO bubble at all. Panel three: the same man sits at a small cafe table listening warmly to a friend who is talking, a softly glowing heart on his chest; no bubbles.

How I actually think​

People sometimes ask, reasonably, "Then what is going on in there?"

Abstract ideas show up easily. Connections show up easily. I can take in a huge amount of information in a short time and see the pattern in it. What does not show up is a picture of anything, or a sentence spoken by a voice.

When I think of a person, I do not see their face. I feel them. When I think of a concept like authenticity, I do not see a scene or hear a definition. I feel what authenticity is. If you gave me a better word for that feeling I would happily switch, because the word was never the point. The feeling was.

The closest description I have found: I move less toward an image of the future and more along a direction, like an inner compass. I do not think in stories as much as I think in systems and how they change. I am a heart-driven person, and I think aphantasia is part of why.

No voice in my head​

I also do not have an inner monologue. Many people hear a running commentary through their day, sometimes several voices that disagree with each other. I do not.

Not everyone with aphantasia is like this. Plenty of people have no mind's eye and a very talkative inner voice. For me the two go together, and I think the combination explains a lot about how quickly I move on (see Moving On) and how present I can be with the person in front of me. There is no second conversation happening in my head while you are talking.

What comes easily​

  • Letting go. I move on from the past quickly and get over a bad mood quickly.
  • Forgiving. I cannot replay a hurtful thing someone said unless I deliberately go looking for it.
  • Changing. I cannot picture myself, so I do not get stuck in a fixed image of who I am. I can grow fast.
  • Big-picture thinking. Without detail crowding in, I think naturally in abstractions, principles, and long time horizons.
  • Not being self-conscious. There is no voice narrating how I look to others.
  • Quitting things cold turkey. I cannot picture the thing I gave up, so there is very little craving pulling me back.
  • Advertising slides off me. A lot of persuasion works by planting an image. There is nowhere for the image to land.
  • Listening. I am an auditory learner, and hours of talks and conversations energize me.
  • Eating the same meal again. I cannot relive a meal, so the tenth time tastes almost as good as the first.

What I build systems for​

It is not all gift, and I want to be honest about that.

  • Names, dates, addresses, and phone numbers. I do not hold them. They come back more easily once I am deep in conversation.
  • Small details. What someone wore, what my apartment looks like, where things were in a room.
  • Memories. I cannot relive my past the way many people can. My memory of my own life is thin.
  • Anticipation. I do not look forward to a vacation the way other people do, because I cannot picture it.
  • Memorizing. I cannot memorize a speech. If I know something by heart, it is because I have internalized it deeply.
  • Visual overload. Images and video tire me out much faster than audio does.

So I write everything down. When a thought arrives, I capture it right away, because it may be gone forever if I do not. It is part of why I am a prolific writer. I keep my calendar religiously, because otherwise I would have no idea what I am doing next week. And I document the people and places I love, because documentation is a memory I can go back to. More on that in Hyper-Documenting.

Why I love AI image tools​

Of course I love AI art generation. It feels like being handed a part of my brain that seems to be missing. I can describe something I feel and, for the first time, see it outside of myself.

Further Reading​