NO BRAINER: HOW APHANTASIA IS LIKE ATHEISM

Maybe twenty years ago I was writing about the strangeness of finding myself labelled an ‘atheist’. To begin with, I was argued that labelling others was a weird practice, and that gifting someone membership in a group that they themselves haven’t or wouldn’t was a mode of conduct we probably wanted to avoid. But, if you still insisted, then it seemed to me like framing things in the negative in this way, as not-something, was unnecessary and a practice we typically refrain from in other areas. Pedestrians, you see, aren’t ‘amotorists’ nor are motorists ‘apedestrians’. Or, indeed, you might hate snowboarding or have never even tried it but, regardless, you’re very unlikely to refer to yourself as a ‘non-snowboarder’ (as opposed to a skier, snowshoer, or ice-climber, or just someone who prefers summer activities…) Right. Too, as in a belief in one particular deity or any of the many pantheons of them, the default position surely must be (from my perspective at least) “lacking” any and all of this. I mean, how could anyone consider non-belief to be a removal or denial of anything — except by the presumptive and demanding language people love using? Belief in anything (continental drift or germ theory or Keynesian economics, but especially a preference for Odin or Quetzalcóatl, Hanuman or Yahweh) must surely be an addition. No? I mean, who comes into the world with knowledge of or intuitions about venial sins or communion rites or of the trickster spider-woman who guards the gates to the underworld? Not I, alas. Sorry, I’m just running in basic human mode, no religion mods or apps installed.

With this experience and bias, the very label of ‘aphantasia’ (for people such as myself who are able to use their minds without visual aid) should have been an early warning sign. It wasn’t, sadly. And now things are getting weird. Though the worlds of psychology and neuroscience have formally documented and accepted it for about a decade now, the research and reporting on ‘aphantasia’ has taken a strange turn, becoming disoriented and disorienting. And I think the label is largely responsible.

What do I mean? Well, a new study investigating aphantasia just landed, for example. To my mind, all of it seems pretty far off. And I would submit that it can only be so off as long as it starts with so much curious baggage and framing and what seems like obviously obtuse language. Reporting on the study shared how a team of researchers used MRI machines to scan the brains of subjects. This, they tell us, showed that “when people with aphantasia try to conjure an image in their mind’s eye...” Did you catch that? Without even getting to what the MRI showed, how does this starting orientation read to you?

People tell me that remembering or “imagining” the future, or just general thinking, are effectively synonymous with a process involving mental imagery. As such, even the basic premise of this research, to me, sounds too much like “You’re an atheist” or “You obviously have a God-shaped hole in your life.” By the label-pusher's accounting, the atheist is at best a kind of childish contrarian or maybe closer to someone suffering from body dysmorphia and determined to amputate their left leg below the knee. And, like the atheist (without god[s]), the aphantasic (without images) is suffering from a kind of mental illness or has had something taken away. Well, I'm here to tell you I have no idea what you’re talking about and am increasingly convinced you don’t either. I would insist that nearly all of this is an unfounded assumption based on your own (mis)perception; that, in fact, there is no visual component inherent to any mental work — as the existence of aphantasia surely makes crystal clear.

Answer me this: how does one “try to conjure an image” in their mind’s eye? Or, if you prefer, tell me what you, a lucid producer of vivid mental imagery, would do to avoid ever using your mind’s eye? Doesn’t that make it clear how silly this ask is? To me it seems as foolish as asking a person born deaf to try and hear? “Now just activate your ear drums. Notice the sonic envelope and frequency range and try and describe these for us.” Of course, when a hearing person listens, they don’t engage their ears, flex a muscle, or put in anything they would describe as work. I certainly do not, at least. Right. So how would you, one with acute hearing, choose to not merely to be distracted or avoid direct and full attention to a particular sound but to avoid, perfectly so, hearing any sound at all? You: Clenches pyloric sphincter. Me: Fires a starter pistol next to your head. You: “I heard nothing, I swear.”

And what about some of your other senses or bodily functions? Are feeling and tasting and smelling not just so passive and accidental as hearing? Sure, it’s true that you can take in more breath and do so faster or only through your nose, say, to smell more or better, but that’s not the act of smelling. I mean, I’m forever trying not to smell something, only to have failed at that every time. As such, I can easily imagine someone who has never smelled anything would only be able to take my word for it that “trying to smell” involves in-taking air through their nose, and they could easily do so, and maybe better than I; but are they, in any real sense, attempting to smell (as opposed to just breathing)?

“Now lose your balance.” “Now stop perceiving time.” “Now have nothing at all arise in your consciousness.” “Don’t read these words. And now erase your knowledge of this sentence and the previous one.” Okay, bro.

Or, to come at this slightly more analogously, there are folks (people folk but also fish, reptile, and bird folk) with tetrachromacy. That means they have four types of cones in their retinas, rather than the three some of us have, giving them a whole other channel for conveying color information. This additional cone variety offers an entire new dimension of colour perception, allowing for the differentiation of hundreds of millions of colours that the rest of us are incapable of. Interestingly, though this seems like a revolutionary superpower, tetrachromacy is actually far more primitive in evolutionary terms. The common ancestor of all vertebrates, in fact, was a tetrachromat. And it was over countless eons that mammals evolved away from their four-cone vision to having only two sets of cones; and then much later, roughly 200 million years later, primates eventually required a third cone-type. As such, having four sets of cones is not some higher rung of the evolutionary ladder or something but, in a sense, the initial condition (like the so-called ‘atheist’). And, in terms of colour discrimination, modern humans don’t have the best or even particularly good vision.

So then, what if I realized that you couldn’t see the vast spectrum of colours I perceive? What if what you perceive as the rainbow-adjacent hues of yellow and orange are to my perception nearly at opposite ends of a much larger rainbow; a rainbow including pinks, purples, browns, blacks, greys, whites, and a whole bunch of colours I have a very difficult time articulating to you because of our lack of shared experience? What if I then stuck you in an MRI machine and showed you a panel of colour and proposed, “Now try and actually see the fullness of the rainbow.” Where are you looking? Why? Are you squinting? Opening your eyes as wide as you can? Straining your eyes in some particular way? Are you thinking hard or trying hard not to think? And what’s happening with your other senses? Are you tuning them out or trying to take in everything you can from every source? What is the work you’re doing and where is it being applied — and, I suppose, why? What would it mean to think about a colour or whole range of them you’ve never seen? What would it mean to flex a muscle you do not have? And, too, following my request and your failed efforts, would you think I was barking up the wrong tree or that you had lost your mind?

Well, more than their premise, the researchers in the aphantasia study tell us that their MRI machines expose how people who report having no mental imagery of any kind “actually do seem to have images of a sort, they remain too weak or distorted to become conscious or be measured by our standard measurement techniques.”

Okay, well, I’m going to tell you I’ve taken samples and readings that tell me all my colour perception test subjects are not actually trichromats but, indeed, tetrachromats — only the fuller perception of colour “seen” by people with four cone-types never arises in the consciousness of those with three types of cones. So they “see” the ultraviolet and infrared spectrum, it’s just that they don’t ever actually perceive it, oh and we're also incapable at the moment of measuring what we assert here. That claim, I hope, would strike you as it does me: like insisting they’ve confirmed the existence of angels through prayer (which is a perfectly legitimate gauge of one’s faith, not evidence of angels...) In this way, aphantasia researchers appear to be starting from an assumption akin to thinking that tetrachromacy is fundamental in modern humans and that trichromacy is a denial or a form of brain damage or something. 

Them: “The goddess is intrinsic, you see, and it’s turtles all the way down, obviously.” Me: “Perhaps. Or maybe you are profoundly incurious and immensely satisfied and invested in confirming what you already believe.”

Look. did it not take us all of human history, until just now, to acknowledge the mere existence of mind’s eye blindness even as a possibility? Correct. So then, every MRI study to date has assumed, wrongly, that thinking involves some sort of mental-visual process and that this process is easily captured in images showing neural activity within the primary visual cortex. Right. And every brain to date has been mapped with that same built-in error (doubtless by people with vivid mental imagery.) Right. Just consider it. Given that no one in the field seemed to believe a human could think about the past or conceive of the future without some degree of mental imagery, does it seem more reasonable to assume that:

A) The blind actually do see (only not in a way that allows them to “see”, or some such thing); or

B) Neuroscience is in its infancy (in such early days, in fact, that we know very little about the relationship between consciousness, perception, and neuroanatomy, or even just what those conceptions could plausibly mean in any deep sense) and that MRI machines are not calibrated to what believe they are?

I, obviously, am going with the latter. If that seems radical then just look at the brain scans below and keep reading.

If you think that’s outlandish then just consider that we have many such examples of violations of everything these same folks assert they know about brains. Even just consider some of the popular reports about people in middle age going to their doctor complaining of some issue or another only to wind up getting a brain scan (something we only now have the tools to do) just to find out they are missing part or virtually all of their brain or that their brain is not functioning. There’s a 24-year-old from China who learned from her doctors that she had no cerebellum (home to 50% of the brain’s neurons and the area neuroscientists tell us is responsible for controlling balance and our basic voluntary motor functions, allowing us to do basics like walking and talking.) Right. Or how about that French guy, age 44, who went to the doctor complaining of leg stiffness whose skull was found to be occupied almost entirely by fluid. Right, the fellow, who behaved normally, had effectively no neurons and was missing his frontal, parietal, temporal, AND occipital lobes — on both the left and right sides of his head. Everything we know about neuroscience tells us the man, married with two kids and who holds a civil service job, should not be able to form or use language, have primary cognitive function or emotions, have vision or hearing or basic sensibility of any kind, or, as the woman above, exhibit voluntary motion. Right. But he does all of the above and appears perfectly normal. Or what about the example of the guy who reported to the doctor that he was dead. He couldn’t explain it but, after a bout of depression and attempting suicide, he wanted doctors to look at his brain because, though he was effectively functioning normally, he felt like his brain had stopped working. When they eventually conducted a PET scan, doctors found, to their astonishment (as ever), that the man’s mind was fully functional while his brain was operating at such a low metabolism that he was, indeed, according to conventional assessment, in a vegetative state. Doctors reported “I’ve been analysing PET scans for 15 years and I’ve never seen anyone who was on his feet, who was interacting with people, with such an abnormal scan result.” “Graham’s brain function” they offered, “resembles that of someone during anaesthesia or sleep. Seeing this pattern in someone who is awake is quite unique to my knowledge.”

So, I would conclude from all these and many more studies like them not that “the brain is more elastic than we previously imagined” as is always the default suggestion. Instead, the conclusion should be that everyone in proximity to the world of brain science, all of them collectively, have no clue what they’re talking about — and show clear signs of a catastrophic lack of imagination paired with low cognitive function.