100% aphantasia + no inner voice since birth — anyone else like this?
(Redacted with ChatGPT cuz I am too lazy)
Hi everyone,
I’m a 23-year-old guy from France, and as far as I can tell, I’ve had complete aphantasia and complete anendophasia since birth.
I have absolutely no voluntary mental imagery. If I close my eyes and try something like the “red apple test,” I see nothing at all — just darkness. I can know what an apple looks like and think about its characteristics, but there is no visual image in my mind.
I also have no inner voice / inner speech whatsoever. I’ve never “heard” my own voice in my head, and I can’t mentally hear other sounds either. For example, I’ve never experienced a song literally playing in my head or being able to hear music internally.
The interesting exception is dreaming. I do dream visually, the images can be very clear while I’m dreaming, and I can remember my dreams afterwards. So apparently my brain is capable of producing visual experiences during sleep, just not voluntarily while I’m awake.
This has been my normal experience for as long as I can remember, so for most of my life I didn’t even realize other people were genuinely seeing images or hearing a voice in their minds.
From what I’ve read, having both of these traits so completely seems relatively uncommon. I’ve never met anyone like this in real life, and I’d really like to.
Is anyone here both completely aphantasic and completely anauralic/anendophasic?
Sometimes I feel pretty alone knowing that almost everyone around me seems to experience an entire internal sensory world that I’ve never experienced.