Ha! This came up on Saturday. I have Aphantasia and I have never read a novel in my life. Even high school texts I read the summaries or watched the movies…
What’s the point of read a novel when you can’t picture a scene or characters in your head!
Compare this to technical books though. I’ve got a large collection and I’ve read through most, and can almost tell you what chapter a subject is in within every book, but tell me to “close your eyes and imagine…” I truely thought “close your eyes and imagine” as a figure of speech!
> I have Aphantasia and I have never read a novel in my life. Even high school texts I read the summaries or watched the movies…
> What’s the point of read a novel when you can’t picture a scene or characters in your head!
That's interesting! I don't have aphantasia but I think I meet the criteria for hypophantasia, and I find it's a major obstacle to enjoying some, but by no means all, novels. Scenes that are heavy on literal visual description are a tedious slog, but plenty of novels focus more on characters, ideas, and/or plot. And I don't find that my lacking a sense of what the characters look like, or failing to see the action in more than a vague and patchy way, is a big problem in those cases.
(I can even get something out of visual description if it's very impressionistic -- the book that comes to mind is A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr -- but of course that could be entirely down to the gap between aphantasia and hypophantasia.)
I wonder if you could enjoy a very dialogue-heavy novel, or a literary novel that focuses mainly on the inner lives of the characters. If you can remember, which ones did you start and give up on, before you gave up on novels completely?
Every time I've picked up a novel to "try again", it's just blank, and I think a heavy dialog book would just make my head explode.
It's funny though, listening to Snow Crash last year was the first fiction audio book I've ever listened to, and that was interesting. Especially because I only listened while running, while listening it was like I was retrieving memories - so still not "imagining with my mind's eye" but still picturing but with audio.
Well, I am very word focused and experience imagery by describing it to myself, so for me a novel is almost like replacing my internal monologue - I would say it's potentially more immersive for me to read than for someone without aphantasia.
In fact if anything I might blame reading a lot at a young age for my aphantasia.
What’s the point of read a novel when you can’t picture a scene or characters in your head!
Compare this to technical books though. I’ve got a large collection and I’ve read through most, and can almost tell you what chapter a subject is in within every book, but tell me to “close your eyes and imagine…” I truely thought “close your eyes and imagine” as a figure of speech!