When I close my eyes and try to conjure up a red apple, or a cloud, all I get is a blank screen. No pictures, no colours. Just the actual darkness of my closed eyes.

For most of my life I assumed that was normal. It turns out it has a name: aphantasia.

So the 'mind's eye' is the experience of seeing something without any light entering your physical eyes. Close your eyes and picture a familiar face, or an apple, and that internal image is your mind’s eye at work. People with aphantasia, like me, don’t create those conscious mental images. Researchers estimate that somewhere between 2 and 4% of people are like this [according to Psychology Today and Aphantasie.org]. Some of us also don’t have an internal monologue, though I do, and I mostly wish I didn’t, but that's for another blog.

It also means that “picture this in your mind’s eye” and “count sheep to fall asleep” are just metaphors to me, not literal descriptions of what other people experience. I can count, but there ain’t no sheep.

Yesterday my eye doctor asked me to repeat a test I’d had two years ago. She called it “the clicker test.” I had no idea what she meant. Nothing. Then she showed me the printout of my previous results, and I remembered instantly because I’d seen it before.

Two years ago, nobody called it the clicker test, so when she asked, my internal search engine came up empty. It had stored the experience under different words, and the label she used didn’t match anything. Once I had a picture to look at, the memory came right back.

Because I don’t store visuals, I store concepts and words. That means I don’t get instant visual recall. When you ask me if I remember something, my brain opens a background app to hunt for the information. I might say “no” at the moment, but the app keeps running quietly until the memory just pops into my head hours or even days later.

This may also help explain why I sometimes can’t remember a TV show we watched the night before, much to my husband’s frustration. I’m not ignoring him, and I’m not being careless. The answer is just still loading.

Knowing all this has changed how I treat myself. I’m not broken, just different. I don't worry about it, but it's helpful to know because it explains a lot.

It explains how I write. I don't see characters at all. No clue what they look like. I can have an idea but never see it, but my brain writes it quietly. I can write a chapter or paragraph and then days or months or years later, the story is there finished. I just need to write it down. 

So try it now: close your eyes and picture an apple. What do you see?