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I read a lot and have aphantasia. Books that are rich with visual descriptions do zero for me (e.g. American Psycho, which has a lot of prose dedicated to desc
by brotchie 2y ago
I read a lot and have aphantasia.
Books that are rich with visual descriptions do zero for me (e.g. American Psycho, which has a lot of prose dedicated to describing what people are wearing). I often even visually skip over section of text that express visual descriptions.
All I can say is that when I'm reading it's the equivalent of me thinking about something.
Let's say I think of a space station, it comes to me as some entity "space station" next to some other entity "planet". These are just abstract tags in my mind, without any associated form.
If I send my attention to the space station entity, I can think of it as "ISS", "2001 Space Odyssey", "Dyson Sphere", "Halo Ring" and it gets richer with concepts. But it's more the feeling in my mind of what each of those space stations would look like geometrically (expressed as relations between shapes, angles, etc).
If I send my attention to the planet entity. I can attribute the tag blue, then I can think more and attribute the tags "clouds."
Rather than me explicitly directing my attention to things in my mind, when I read the text in a book the author is directing my attention in this manner.
There's just no rich visual experience.
- abathur 2y agoI will lightly defend a lot of this description in American Psycho. I agree that I generally gloss over that sort of description, but in the case of this one book I felt like the obsessively-materialist descriptions in it did a great job of helping communicate the vacuuous frivolity of the culture the novel's picking at, if that makes sense? That is to say, when I feel like the descriptions are ~fungible I'm probably right there with you in skipping over them, but they were one of my favorite parts of American Psycho.