r/CureAphantasia

I’m a 24 year old male who was prescribed an antidepressant to help with sleep. After the first or second dose, my internal monologue, ability to generate thoughts, emotions, and ability to experience awards diminished significantly. This has gotten progressively worse over the past 6 months, triggered by things such as alcohol (even small amounts) and supplements for sleep. Now, I can not get a song stuck in my head, I have zero thoughts, cant imagine anything/daydream, and no longer get goosebumps from music. Is this something I am going to have to live with for the rest of my life? Before this, my mind would never shut up, now its just an empty void. I am trying a combonation of guanfacine, NAC, omega 3s, lithium orotate, probiotics, and will start neurofeedback shortly. My diet is mostly whole foods and I generally get a good amount of movement. Has anyone else had any luck on reversing antidepressant induced aphantasia and anauralia? How long did it take?

I'm Alapv. I'm aphantasic -> hyperphantasic. If you've known me long enough and are experienced enough with visualization, this is basically a progressive overload quick trick to improve visualization. If you are a hater, skip this. I don't reply to baseless cynicism or people trying to figure things out. I'm not a professional scientist don't ask me to provide proof.

1. New aphantasia understanding.
2. Ever wonder why despite dogs have been living with us for thousands of years, they never develop our linguistic fluency or tools usage? Or why psychopaths are incapable of sympathizing with others? That's right. Lack of nervous system required for those specific functions (and can't develop the functions). Same for aphantasics, we lack the brain part responsible for storing images and therefore recalling these images for visualization. To be more precise, we do store images but oftens times as words or concepts instead of the literal images themselves. Here's what it looks like:

https://preview.redd.it/xknbtyvuc22h1.png?width=2554&format=png&auto=webp&s=0af04f30c65282c8c8cc1018e9d7d66a5861b305

2. So what we do?
   We pivot to another universal human learning mechanism which is "thoughts creation" and "holding as much information as possible". There's a human benchmark test that's perfect to demonstrate what circumventing visualization looks like: https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/chimp

Basically there're a lot of close eyes and imagining the invisible links between the numbers. You can get creative as long as you are accurate and are able to progress to the next level. The same thing for visualization: you take a good look at the image and assume a bunch of bullshit about the image, might it be concept, verbal as long as you get close to the spatial/weighty feel of image then you are getting very close to actual visualization. It kinda looks like this

Yes \"random bullshit go\"

3. Please remember this: You cannot store images, it's physically impossible.
   You cannot look at colors, flat images, and videos and remember them. Aphantasics physically lack a visual storer, they cannot develop their visual library the same way dogs cannot develop a language speaking capability. The only thing you can do is "live image analysis," basically choosing an image you like and analyze it, cycling your thoughts at an inhuman level. I promise it will produce actual visualization given that your intensity is good enough. Basically "natural phantasics' visualization is about storing and recalling image, man-made phantasics' visualization is literally making everything from scratch"

4. Food
   This one is important because I find choline to have direct impact on my thoughts creating capability. You can either buy supplements or eat 3 eggs 30 mins before practice.

Has anyone had experience developing their auditory visualisation?

I know that Aphantasia is really about visual images in your head.
However, Has anyone thought about your auditory (and other sensory) visualisation?

If you were to visualise a sound, or someones voice, (if you can at all conjure that up)
Is it:
The exact sound or their exact voice
OR
Your voice's best interpretation of it

I ask this because, some people do hear the other persons voice and, idk, the sound of a violin.
I however, only hear my own best recreation of such a sound.
As in, I do not hear another persons voice. If I am imagining a conversation between me and a friend, it is just a conversation between me....and me.
If I was to imagine the sound of a violin, it'd be as close in my head as I could make it with my own voice as if I were to do it aloud.

I have no idea where to start with this!
I've found great progress with visualisation by meditating. (I believe a pinned or the top post of all time has the method I used, I didn't know of it, but it is pretty much what I did!

Now that I've defeated visual images, I want to defeat this next boss!

I've also heard that people can imagine smells, and touch, and taste. So, there's a whole world out there (well, in here)