Ask Lemmy

You're asking the wrong question. How do you guys without aphantasia manage to read when there's pictures whizzing around your head all the time??

Mechanically, whenever I read about someone's or someplace's introduction and it describes their appearance, I'll just skip that section. If it's more than a sentence-long description I'll often unconsciously just move on to the next paragraph - it's literally meaningless to me.

I read a lot when I'm not stressed. This week, I've read the whole of the Robots series by Isaac Asimov (four books, around 1500 pages total). Several times, I've read entire books in one sitting without even moving.

I can't really tell you if it affects my ability to enjoy books, because I don't know how I'm "supposed" to enjoy a book. So instead I'll just talk about why I like to read.

1. Emotion Being able to feel something that really doesn't happen to me in my daily life. I feel much stronger emotions through reading (and films or TV as well, to a lesser extent) than I ever can about myself and the real people in my world. For example,

2. World-building This is something that I think Alastair Reynolds is really good at. He writes science fiction books that are grounded in reality, and being able to see what he imagines. Another good example is old science fiction where there's the dichotomy between humanity having conquered space thousands of years ago and yet the cutting edge of technology developed a few years ago is recieving the news on a paper ticker tape! Seeing what what the authors imagined vs things we take for granted today but was so advanced it never even occurred to them, like the Internet.

3. Mystery / plot There's a certain beauty to seeing the web that's been built up over the course of a story all coming together at the end. A good example would be Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time where all the threads come together and the resolution at the end wasn't what I expected but, in hindsight, nothing else would have done it justice.

4. Character growth Gravity Dreams by LE Modesitt is my favourite book and I don't know why. I think it's just that the journey the main character goes through really speaks to me and gets me thinking about my own philosophy and life.

In summary, I'll say that you don't have to see something to comprehend what is happening and to be touched emotionally. As for your other question, I also watch film and TV but I definitely prefer animated over live. I can get easily confused between different actors which doesn't happen with animation for me. I find that TV or film takes less effort to enjoy, but also that I don't enjoy it as much as a book.

Quoting my partner that has it: "Comic books are cool for that. I love books. I tend to gloss over heavy descriptions of place settings, I don't spend a lot of time trying to picture it so I prefer books with dialogue. Watching a show before reading the books does help though. (Like we did with The Expanse.)"

They also mentioned that Red Rising action scenes are ridiculously descriptive and they typically skim those sections to find out who hits whom.

Not sure that I can really compare it to how I would be without aphantasia since, of course, it is all I have ever known, but I do stll enjoy reading. Like other people are saying, I don't tend to concern myself with visual descriptions

This carries over to my TTRPG gameplay. I rarely ever actually describe what anyone looks like beyond the absolutely vaguest of descriptions (i.e. a heavily-built man, getting on years), which I didn't notice until a player pointed it out to me. I mostly go by mannerisms, which I suppose is an aspect of appearance

I am still quite good at building mental maps of locations and can do all the classic "rotate a shape" kind of stuff. I can't visualise it, but I can figure it out. I guess I'm mentally storing it in another format. Possibly related to that, one of the few types of illustration I do particularly enjoy getting in a book is a map

I prefer books that don't waste too many sentences describing things that have no relevance, but I can still enjoy a good story.

Time spend on video medium is like 1000x more than reading.

I rarely read books, by rarely I mean I just skim all school reading materials, and only pick up random books lying around at home (that were given out for free by the public library) to read when my electronics were broken/consfiscated by parents.

I read a lot of news and wikipedia aricles tho, those are somehow just more fun than a book.

There are some adapted works that I've seen the adaptation of, but still haven't read the source materials yet. I kinda just read the wikis to check any differences between the 2 mediums... 🤷‍♂️

Recently, I came across some interesting works of fiction that didn't have an adaptation in a video medium, so I reluctantly started reading. Recursion was a fun read with the audiobook playing in background at 1.2x speed.

When I read, I usually use the sterotypical portrayal of that character's archetype from other visual mediums to like fill in the character model and use similar scenes from visual media to paint the room and atmosphere.

I have like a "level 3" on the aphantasia scale, so like I could just barely paint the scenary.

If I do my own worldbuilding and my own story, I can sort of see the world slightly mroe clearly, like a "level 2" on the apantasia scale.

Kinda echoing other comments in here, to say that lengthy segments where the author is describing the appearance of something can be rather annoying to me. I can't see it. No matter how many flowery words you use, I can't see it. I know what it is that you're describing, I already got a good-enough understanding with the first few sentences. But I can't see it. Please, please just move on to the actual story.

I really wanted to get into Stephen King's Dark Tower series. I made it to the point in the first book where two characters spend an extended amount of time in a pitch black tunnel. Oh. My. Fucking. God. I can only take so many pages of "Boy it sure is dark in here" before I lose my patience. I've started that book at least 5 times, and could never manage to make it past that section because it's just so infuriating to read. It's almost like the book is mocking me, as if to say "Hah hah, get a load of this goober, can't even see the darkness!"

I don't blame authors for this, though. It's not their responsibility to cater their art to my neurodivergence. It's just a minor frustration I've learned to live with. But it's also part of the reason why I don't read much for leisure. I think this is why I'm generally more tolerant of films that aren't as good as the books they're adapted from, because the alternative is that I'll likely otherwise never experience the story at all, so I'll take what I can get.

Details in books and written media as a list, not a series of images. Loved reading as a kid, dropped off when I spent more time doing other things, like cpmouter gaming.

The upside is that witthout a mental picture of characters any close enough visual take on the character will work for me. I also have ADHD so small details are likely forgotten and only the prominent ones that the character is defined by are going to be weird if mkssed.

For example when I heard Idris Elba was going to be cast as Roland in The Dark Tower it was a big positive because he seemed like someone that would be able to oull off the personality of the character and I was only concerned about whether they would do a good job with the missing fingers or drop it entirely as missing fingers was a big part of Roland's character for me. Yeah I know there was something involving race in the books, but that plotline was something that didn't seem to be necessary to carry over into a movie.

Of course the movie ended up being a pile of trash, but is a good example of how I focus more on how the character acts than how they look.

Same with a lot of science, swords, and other objects where I really don't have a mental image so a lot of sets work as long as they have the things or the general feel.

I really enjoy reading, but I can't picture a scene, or what characters look like. It can be a bit confusing at times, but doesn't usually take away from the enjoyment.

As an example, my favourite sci fi author Randolph Lalonde (great independent author, buy his books 👍) had a scene in a recent book where some characters had a shootout in a warehouse that held several spaceships. The ships were all at least a few metres long, so the warehouse was huge. In my head, everything was centred on a small area around the characters, and I could sort of picture them being within a few feet of each other.

I couldn't picture any details, it was as if he had written that 'the man stood near the woman, and pointed the gun towards the crates', even though the scene was well written with good descriptions. My brain couldn't translate the description into a layout in my head.

I still really enjoyed the scene, but every now and then it was as if my brain realised that things should be further apart, or one character should be taller than another, for example.

I don't have aphantasia and I don't particularly fancy any medium over the other, but what I often miss is sound. Music is a whole different language to either visual or conceptual as conveyed by words, whereas imagery to me feels the most direct and laziest, music can convey feelings there are neither words nor imagery for, and so often I like adaptations of written works for injecting some fitting music, and will listen to fitting music as I read books.

Didn’t have it for most of my life, but briefly had it, along with some memory issues. It made understanding what I was reading nigh on impossible. Any lengthy descriptions fell through my memory near instantly, as I had no practice in maintaining a purely conceptual memory of a piece of writing. On reflection, I’m terribly impressed with those who manage to deal with the absence of an audiovisual imagination to compress information.