Do You "Picture" Things You Read?

Perhaps you're one of those readers who vividly envisions settings and characters when you read. You might even rely heavily on the author's descriptions in order to do so, and feel cheated if there isn't considerable detail about characters' hair and skin color, about what's in their homes, or what kind of vegetation they encounter when hiking.

On the other hand, maybe you're one of those readers who skips past "tedious" description to get to the dialog. You might not even envision any of what's described, or have any expectation that you would truly see something in what we call your mind's eye.

Or, of course, you might be somewhere in the middle of these extremes.

These are all perfectly normal, but very different, ways of experiencing the written word--and life more generally. Humans experience mental pictures (or don't) along a spectrum that goes from seeing nothing at all (aphantasia) up to envisioning things as if they were watching an amazingly detailed movie (hyper-phantasia). The same sort of variation is true for mentally conjuring up sounds, smells, taste, and touch/movement, but it appears that the most study has been devoted to visualization and its lack. Indeed, study of any form of aphantasia or hyper-phantasia is a pretty recent phenomenon, because it's been only relatively recently that people seem to have begun to realize that what they themselves experience in terms of visualization or other imagined sensory experience isn't necessarily what their siblings or their friends experience. The internet is now full of people with aphantasia telling how surprised they were to learn that many people actually do see something in their mind's eye--that it's not just a figure of speech.

I don't have either aphantasia or hyper-phantasia, but when I first heard of aphantasia, I was deeply intrigued. Despite being an art historian, my ability to call up a visual image is extremely limited. I'm good at identifying works by artists I'm familiar with--I can easily walk into a room at a museum and start pointing at artworks across the room and tell you which one is by Romaine Brooks or Archipenko or Jacob Lawrence. But that doesn't mean I can summon up artworks in my mind in anything but the vaguest way. I have a general sense of what Matisse's Blue Nude looks like (horizontal, blue body, fairly abstract), but that's about as clear as I can get. I don't know whether her head is to the right or the left until I refresh my memory by looking at a photo of the painting.

This led to a somewhat embarrassing moment in my PhD orals, in fact. We were discussing collage, and at some point Terry Smith, who was on my dissertation committee, expected me to remember what Picasso's Still Life with Chair Caning looks like. It wasn't unreasonable of him to expect me to know this work, because it actually is quite important in the history of collage. I did know that I was generally familiar with it and could probably identify it if I saw it, but at that point in my studies I hadn't fully realized its historical significance; to me it was just one of many works that Picasso and Braque made around 1912 that combined painting and collage or assemblage. But Terry seemed to think he could gradually lead me to visualize the thing, which I really couldn't do. Even now, after having taught this artwork many times, the best I can do is summon up a horizontal oval framed by a piece of rope. I'm aware that Picasso collaged a print of chair-caning onto the thing, but although I can sort of recall the pattern of the chair-caning, I can't attach that to the oval framed by the rope, or recall just what Picasso painted onto the print except that it was the sort of standard table-top items Picasso liked to put in his still lifes at that period in his career. So... probably a newspaper and a bottle or glass or cup and maybe a plate. This kind of detail just does not remain in my visual memory.

Likewise, while I have a clearer visual recollection of Girodet's painting Endymion, which I've also often taught and which is the basis of the more psychedelic-looking figure on the cover of In Search of the Magic Theater, I couldn't tell you offhand where the dog in the painting is located. I get a fairly good mental image of the overall painting--it's dark, with Endymion reclining across it and Cupid entering from the upper left, but while I know the dog is in the lower part of the painting, is it to the left or the right? I just can't see the dog at all. (Granted, the dog is not a very important figure, but most pictures of the sleeping Endymion do include his dog and so does this one.)

As you might guess, therefore, writing visual description is not something I'm uniformly good at. It's not that I can't do it, but I often have a very hard time recalling enough about things I want to describe.

Maggie Giles, another of the 2022 Debut novelists, is a writer who has full-blown aphantasia. She doesn't see anything at all in her mind's eye. She discusses that and other aspects of her writing in this Instagram Live interview with Dara Levan. Among the things Maggie says about her writing process: first, she writes a draft that emphasizes dialog and plot, and then she goes back and fills in description, often with the help of photographs.

What about the reader's perspective? What do readers want?

I have read that readers want and expect lots of visual information because they rely on this to form their mental movies of novels. I daresay some of them do, but I also have to wonder whether some of those readers simply lack imagination, that they can't come up with their own mental movie without a ton of help from the author. I myself enjoy rich description but it doesn't produce any sort of mental movie for me, and I don't miss rich description if it's not there--I form my own impression of characters and setting even if it's not particularly visually rich or detailed.

I've also read that readers with aphantasia may find detailed description a waste of time. Does this mean that those people not only can't picture things but don't get any sense of place or costuming or whatnot from the descriptions given? After all, many people with aphantasia are actually visual artists, so it isn't like having aphantasia means that a person necessarily lacks visual skills, they just don't see things in their mind's eye. I'll bet some of those artists with aphantasia could come up with illustrations for what they've read. And--a different question--are Ivy Compton Burnett's novels especially appealing to readers with aphantasia because they consist almost solely of dialog and are nearly devoid of visual description? Inquiring minds want to know!

I haven't even touched upon aphantasia and hyper-phantasia in senses other than the visual. All of this varies enormously from person to person. For instance, I can have extremely strong sensory recall of some kinds of touch and motion, but that doesn't mean that if I read about velvet I actually feel like I'm touching velvet. I can imagine touching velvet if I make the effort, but I don't have any emotional connection to touching velvet, so I'm not much inclined to imagine touching velvet, whereas I have a strong emotional connection to the memory of my late Rex rabbit Mikko (aka Mr. Velvet-coat) and can instantly recall the sensation of his fur.

Want to learn more about aphantasia? Check out www.aphantasia.com. The Aphantasia Network was founded by Tom Ebeyer and has lots of interesting information on the subject.