Internal monologues and a spot of aphantasia...
Turns out I'm a hippo.
As I am now in the throes of the book tour, this article feels more relevant than ever. I am meeting many new people each week, and sometimes the same person more than once but I will likely not realise. This is why…
A revelation
Every now and then you have a conversation, or read an article that makes you gasp in a ‘how have I never known this?!?!’ way. You know, the ‘I’ve been on the planet for over 50 years - why did no one tell me that?’ feeling? Some of the discoveries are small, about things like language - such as when I realised that epitome (pronounced correctly) was spelt ‘epitome’ and that the word I had been reading on the page did not rhyme with ‘home’; or when I finally heard the phrase ‘as opposed to’ correctly, which all my life I had thought was ‘as supposed to’ which didn’t quite make sense. There are many of these, and don’t even get me started on lyrics
(check out Allegra’s hilarious note about the lyrics to ‘Drop the Pilot’ by Joan Armatrading - always been a mystery to me)!But apart from these minor revelations, every now and then one is quite jaw dropping, like the time I somehow discovered that not everyone has an ‘internal monologue’. I think I read an article on it, and then felt like I didn’t actually understand the world any more. Hwhat??? There are people that don’t have a CONSTANT monologue in their head, all day every day??? HOW CAN THAT BE???? What on earth is in their head?!?!
What do you experience?
As I live my life, walk, work, talk, play, do whatever…there is a constant voice in my head narrating what I’m doing. It’s not bothersome or intrusive, it just ‘is’, and I had assumed that this was just what brains do. Everyone’s brains. Oh no. After doing a bit more research, I WhatsApped my closest friends to try and recapture some semblance of my perceived reality - please tell me you exist like I do?!!! But no…my closest friends in the world do not have internal monologues, nor does my husband.
I had truly entered the Twiglet zone.
One of my friends just has images and visuals, another sees everything in colours, another says there really isn’t anything in her head unless she is consciously doing something. I literally cannot comprehend any of this. I remember when I was chairing a meeting at work in my former life, and my deputy went totally blank towards the end - fair enough, I guessed he was daydreaming and the subject matter was pretty dry. After the meeting I convivially asked him: ‘where did you go?!?"‘; he looked blank. ‘You zoned out’ I said ‘what was on your mind'?’. ‘Oh nothing’ he said, and he actually meant nothing. NOTHING. Not an ‘I can’t be bothered to explain’ kind of nothing, he actually wasn’t thinking of anything at all. HOW?? When Himself tells me there is nothing in his head I am far less surprised and so I try and console myself it’s a man thing…but no…my besties?!??!
I feel betrayed by life.
It took me some time to get over this, and I’m not sure I’ll ever quite recover, but I have chosen to move on, and at least I can chat to myself about it. But then yesterday…
What can you see?
I was talking to Himself, (so he must have allowed conscious thought into his head for the purposes of a conversation) and I mentioned to him that I’d been asked to visualise something, and I just couldn’t do it. He had always said previously that as a young man who was a pretty good rugby player, he would visualise scoring a try. He talks a lot in visuals. I remember when I went for a job interview once, he advised that I visualise being there - confident and successful - I didn’t know how to do this. My daughter can visualise passing her driving test, I can barely visualise a car. When we spoke yesterday I reiterated, ‘I just can’t visualise things’, and it just so happened he had listened to a Richard Herring podcast and he said, ‘you know, you might have ‘aphantasia’’.
‘AphaWhat now?’
It’s a word used to describe those who cannot form mental images. If I try and visualise lakes and mountains, I have something in my head that a six-year-old would draw. A blue blob, some green blobs, and a triangle in the background. Visualising the sun is ok, as it’s an orange blob, but a face? No chance. My husband asks if I can visualise our daughters, so I try to picture Taz (who is 15 and lives at home). Ok, I can see a form, and I can surround the faceless ‘head’ with red hair (like felt tip scribbled orange), but there are no features, no defined clothing, and no location or context. I try and visualise a horse, and I can see a brown blob with 4 legs, I can ‘know’ that the horse is pawing at the ground and there is a tree nearby but I cannot see it. I can form an outline image, but it slips away, I can’t grasp it.
When they’re home from school/college I ask Taz and Fiver what they can see in their mind. Fiver can see absolute clarity of images, and can play a movie in her head. She can see a horse in detail, make it walk, trot, gallop, put a rider on it, take it through a variety of landscapes. Wow. Fiver also has a VERY strong internal monologue. There is an awful lot going on in her head. Taz is a national gymnast, so I ask her if she can visualise herself doing a vault, for example. She says that she can, but that she is looking at herself from above and she always ‘splats’ (lands on her face). I can’t see that being particularly helpful competition prep. I ask her if she can ‘make’ her visualised self land perfectly - she struggles and says ‘maybe, but then the camera angle is all weird’. The camera in our mind?? I then ask them to visualise themselves swimming. Fiver IS the swimmer, she can see the water, the sea, the sky, her hands in front of her, all with absolute clarity. Taz is ‘looking’ at herself as the swimmer, a birds-eye view of the pool where she can see someone she knows is her. I do a bit of both, flitting between being the swimmer and seeing the swimmer but in a very loosely sketched way and I can’t hold onto either. A flash of scribbled water, and then it’s gone.
What do you see when you try and visualise yourself swimming?
Sorry, have we met…?
I have also come to realise that I have an element of ‘face blindness’. I wonder if and how these things may be linked. Stephen Fry talks a lot about face blindness - medically termed as ‘prosopagnosia’ - and although I don’t have it to the same extent, I simply cannot remember people until I have met them several times. It can be really embarrassing. At a London Fire Brigade work do for my husband not long ago, I was introduced to one of his colleague’s wives - she was lovely, and we chatted for quite a while about all sorts of things, her job in the Police force, life, kids… We really connected. A short while later (literally less than half an hour after I’d last spoken to her), I saw her, and I introduced myself to her as if for the first time, ‘Hi, I’m Emma, I’m Ian’s wife’. ‘Er yes, I know, we were just talking’.
ARGHH
Mental note - lady with blonde hair, tall, red dress - we have already met, don’t reintroduce self again. For the third time.
I don’t have it badly, in that I have no problem recognising people I have become familiar with, unlike Stephen Fry who explains how when relatives come up to him in the street, he tries to sign an autograph for them. Ouch.
At the lake where I swim, lovely people are always coming up to me and saying ‘hi Emma!!’, and I have absolutely no idea who they are. This does actually bother me because I really care about the people I meet, and I will likely have had a meaningful and genuine conversation with them, I just cannot associate that experience with their face until we have met several times. It can be very awkward, but it’s not because the conversation didn’t mean anything or impact me, quite the opposite. I will have absolutely remembered what we talked about, I just don’t know it was with that person who is currently smiling at me. When they then perhaps update me on, for example, their daughter’s cancer treatment, it all comes flooding back but I until I get some other clue, I often have no idea what we’ve already shared.
Derek tastes of earwax
There was an extraordinary programme on the BBC several years ago, which neither my husband nor I have ever forgotten. It was a Horizon programme called ‘Derek tastes of earwax’, and it was the first time either of us had ever come across the phenomenon that is synaesthesia, which is described as a blending of the senses, where the stimulation of one sense can provoke a response in others. In the programme it explained further how the senses can overlap and become linked, and in this particular man’s situation, whenever he heard the name ‘Derek’ he would get a taste of earwax in his mouth. It was slightly unfortunate as he was a pub landlord and one of his regulars was called…yes…Derek. Another person explained how letters have colours, and words and music can result in an explosion of colour for her, which whilst glorious, can also be very overwhelming. My friend who sees in colours has synaesthesia and tells me I am orange, because ‘Emma’ begins with an ‘E’, and' ‘E’ is orange (not because I’ve overdone the fake tan). I must ask her what her level of mental imagery is, I bet it would blow my mind.
I do not have synasethesia, but I am fascinated by it, as I am now with the other things I’ve recently discovered - prosopagnosia, and aphantasia. Whilst Himself was telling me about the aphantasia podcast, I began to explore a bit further and came across this test online:
Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire
It’s quite blunt, as I don’t feel that my images are ‘dull and vague’, more ‘sketched and fleeting’, but it gives a broad indication. I received the following big, bold result:
YOU ARE HYPOPHANTASTIC
As I do have a level of imagery, my way of being is not ‘aphantasia’, it is ‘hypophantasia. I am a fantastic hippo’. Who knew? Although as I write it down I realise it is pronounced ‘hypo’ with a long ‘i’.
Finding your way
The brain is an extraordinary thing indeed, and one we will never understand, but wow it is fascinating. As with all elements of neurodiversity, which surely these are, it’s just reassuring to understand your own way of being - once the shock of realising that not everyone else experiences things in the same way has died down. It may just be something interesting to note and talk about, or it may be something that requires further exploration and the development of coping strategies.
So on my own extraordinary life journey, I have come to learn that I have an element of face blindness and hypophantasia (amongst a plethora of other things), and it’s given me cause to reflect on how to adapt and use this knowledge.
With the prosopagnosia, I try and remember details such as what someone is wearing, what their hair is like, what jewellery they wear, details that I can perhaps match up in my brain for next time we meet so I don’t appear so unbelievably rude. Obviously that doesn’t help when people change their clothes and jewellery, but it’s a start.
With the lack of visualisation, it’s been really quite enlightening just verbalising it. Yesterday I had a hypnotherapy session, and during that the the therapist asked me to ‘take myself to a place in the sunshine’, and later to ‘walk down a corridor into a room’. Nope, not gonna happen. It took such extraordinary effort to try and form this image, that I lost the ‘relaxation’ totally. I explain this to the therapist afterwards, and she says that’s fine, perhaps I just experience thoughts and feelings instead of images. YES!! That’s it!!! So where she had been instructing me to visualise a control panel on a table in a room, and to be able to ‘dial down’ the anxiety on the control panel, I could not do this, but when she asked if I could push down anxious feelings… yes, yes I could do that. No one had ever asked me before whether I could visualise or not. But now, I know!
It all comes back to strategies, but you can only start finding strategies once you become aware that you actually have a certain way of being that is perhaps not the same as the given majority, or as the people who have written the manuals on how to ‘do life’. The first step is in the ‘knowing’.
I’ve included a few interesting articles below, and I’d really love to hear what your experiences are in these areas. If you have colours, are they wonderful or overwhelming? Can you see clear mental images? Do you have an inner monologue and did you know that not everyone does?
However it is for you, I hope that your own way of being brings you much joy and wonder in your uniqueness, and that none of it tastes of earwax.
What the voice inside your head says about you
The small portion of individuals that cannot see mental images
Test to diagnose ‘face blindness’
As always
Love & lemons 💕🍋
Em xxx
I have about seven internal dialogues at any given moment!! And ridiculously detailed visuals too - but names? Forget it! I can know you for twenty years, see you regularly and STILL draw a blank!! It’s HUGELY frustrating! Great post Em ..ily? 😝
Hi Emma, such a fascinating topic this, and weirdly I had a discussion about this only last week with my 19yo daughter who had realised she can’t visualise things much at all. I couldn’t comprehend how she couldn’t see things in her mind immediately! I think she’s like you in that she can grasp a few visuals but they aren’t very strong and it’s not natural for her at all. Meanwhile with any word she mentioned I could imagine not just an image but also the context, maybe a narrative, or memory, perhaps another context, I can’t stop it all coming into my mind like a movie, or 5 movies all at once.
I also have an strong internal narrative, (often from a variety of voices or viewpoints) although I’ve realised that actually it’s not always a narrative composed of words. Lots of the time it is just the feelings and emotions, like I bypass the language and go straight to an interpretation of what the narrative means.