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aphantasia and reading
May. 21st, 2024 11:17 am ( Pet Loss Grief )
This has sparked some interesting conversations about consumption of media. Specifically, the intersection of fast reading and aphantasia. I hadn't really thought about how most people synthesize their experience of narrative in books. I am almost completely aphantasic - I do not see pictures in my head when I talk about things - with extreme effort I can fleetingly summon a millisecond geometry of outline of say, "apple", but then it slips away. When I think of "apple", I hear, taste, and experience the 'crunch' in my head, with a side dictionary table of types/definitions/connections (green/red/mealy/baking/etc). Versus someone else, perhaps being able to see an apple in two or three D, needing description in the book on which apple they should be picturing.
When one applies this difference to reading, it explains why I can read so much faster than many, without "speed-reading", or skipping reading all but the first sentence of a book. All of the visual character description, so necessary for visual readers to feel like a novel is not self insert, is completely useless to me. Authors spending pages on descriptions of vast landscapes bores. If I read it fast enough that the table definitions of connections associated with the words (mountain scene: general concept: OC, description of internal landscapes, sensations, of thrist/tiredness/heat) I engage more, but the purely visual descriptions yield simply a blob labelled OC in my head that is much more weighted with their narrative/actions/cultural background than any visual description, and a flash or two of the described scene (characters in hayloft, then gone; focus moves to the connections and interactions between characters instead; described sensation, mismatched expectations, etc. This preference absolutely changes the writing styles that I like to read.
If I don't read fast enough or with enough focus, the words just don't come together.
Audio books are a different way of engaging with the story, but don't always work either, as they don't always read out the "she said suspiciously" etc, relying on my interpretation of their version of suspicious tonality. This is a Bad Choice with my interpretation skills. The lack of the written word availability to be chewed on can complicate, and the pacing feels incredibly slow, as I read at a speed of at least 3x audio speed to knit the story together in my mind.
Videos with subtitles are best, as you get both the text and someone doing the hard work of picturing things for you. Perhaps that is why I like the audiovisual studies thing so much.
How does this engagement method work with non-fiction? I have almost no interest in non-fiction when not doing specific research into issues that I am interested in. Non-fiction is approached with several read throughs of each short paragraph, systemically identifying tiers of information importance and then working to memorize what's needed, or find the elusive core concepts of the chapter, followed by immediate application of ideas until I retain. This lack of internal visual systems explains why learning chemistry was so hard for me -- it requires the ability to hold and rotate molecules in your mind to thrive - I needed to use a software application to even approach this skill.
In retrospect, these last few paragraphs have been a solid example of application of logic and intellect to distance myself from my feelings and how much it sucks to not be able to retreat from them when I am not actively giving space to engage with them at home. It's damned inconvenient to have so many of them that they can't stay in their lane of "home safe ok to process now" space.
This has sparked some interesting conversations about consumption of media. Specifically, the intersection of fast reading and aphantasia. I hadn't really thought about how most people synthesize their experience of narrative in books. I am almost completely aphantasic - I do not see pictures in my head when I talk about things - with extreme effort I can fleetingly summon a millisecond geometry of outline of say, "apple", but then it slips away. When I think of "apple", I hear, taste, and experience the 'crunch' in my head, with a side dictionary table of types/definitions/connections (green/red/mealy/baking/etc). Versus someone else, perhaps being able to see an apple in two or three D, needing description in the book on which apple they should be picturing.
When one applies this difference to reading, it explains why I can read so much faster than many, without "speed-reading", or skipping reading all but the first sentence of a book. All of the visual character description, so necessary for visual readers to feel like a novel is not self insert, is completely useless to me. Authors spending pages on descriptions of vast landscapes bores. If I read it fast enough that the table definitions of connections associated with the words (mountain scene: general concept: OC, description of internal landscapes, sensations, of thrist/tiredness/heat) I engage more, but the purely visual descriptions yield simply a blob labelled OC in my head that is much more weighted with their narrative/actions/cultural background than any visual description, and a flash or two of the described scene (characters in hayloft, then gone; focus moves to the connections and interactions between characters instead; described sensation, mismatched expectations, etc. This preference absolutely changes the writing styles that I like to read.
If I don't read fast enough or with enough focus, the words just don't come together.
Audio books are a different way of engaging with the story, but don't always work either, as they don't always read out the "she said suspiciously" etc, relying on my interpretation of their version of suspicious tonality. This is a Bad Choice with my interpretation skills. The lack of the written word availability to be chewed on can complicate, and the pacing feels incredibly slow, as I read at a speed of at least 3x audio speed to knit the story together in my mind.
Videos with subtitles are best, as you get both the text and someone doing the hard work of picturing things for you. Perhaps that is why I like the audiovisual studies thing so much.
How does this engagement method work with non-fiction? I have almost no interest in non-fiction when not doing specific research into issues that I am interested in. Non-fiction is approached with several read throughs of each short paragraph, systemically identifying tiers of information importance and then working to memorize what's needed, or find the elusive core concepts of the chapter, followed by immediate application of ideas until I retain. This lack of internal visual systems explains why learning chemistry was so hard for me -- it requires the ability to hold and rotate molecules in your mind to thrive - I needed to use a software application to even approach this skill.
In retrospect, these last few paragraphs have been a solid example of application of logic and intellect to distance myself from my feelings and how much it sucks to not be able to retreat from them when I am not actively giving space to engage with them at home. It's damned inconvenient to have so many of them that they can't stay in their lane of "home safe ok to process now" space.
