Everyone experiences reality in a slightly different way – but unless we describe those experiences in great detail, the differences between them go undetected. Biologist Mia Tomova has described in detail how her visual imagination seems lacking compared to that of others, a condition that is called aphantasia. She is unable to construct images of things in her mind’s eye. It is hard to know what other people see in their mind’s eye, just as it is hard to know if you see the same blues as I see when we look at the sky. Mia is probably correct when she suggests that there are different degrees of visual imagination, from the very precise colourful imaginations of some artists who are able to reconstruct faces from memory, all the way to the complete absence of visual images of which she is so aware. I think I am somewhere nearer her end of the spectrum, or rather lack of spectrum, in that I can construct fuzzy images, but never in colour.
Oliver Sacks described several times the experiences of people who were unable to construct depth perception in their view of the world, which shows how, even when the visual information is being received there are still active processes necessary to complete a visualisation. And he was also very interested in the visual hallucinations that are the productions of brains that receive incomplete visual data about our surroundings. For most people who experience these hallucinations, they are so vivid that only cognitive processing can help them to distinguish what is real and unreal. A bit of a hard task for people with co-existing dementia – as in Keeper, or Somebody I used to Know.
This kind of personal variation in our visual perception and visual reconstruction of the world is at the heart of phenomenology, a precise systematic description of a person’s perception of an object or phenomenon. And Jean-Paul Sartre’s one-eyed version of the world may account for some of the more vividly disconcerting elements of his novel, La Nausee/ Nausea.
Mia raises a separate issue about the difference between the voluntary and the dreaming imagination. For despite her absence of waking images, she is a lucid dreamer. What does that say about where in the brain we construct our voluntary visual images of the world? Perhaps Mia is constructing those images all the time, but it is only during dreaming that she has some awareness of them.
This short experience piece raises all sorts of questions about human beings’ perceptions of the world. We need more of them.
Tomova, M (2018) I can’t picture things in my mind, The Guardian, 25 August 2018
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/aug/24/experience-i-cant-picture-things-in-my-mind