Hacker News Reader

Comment by sixothree | Hacker News Reader

> - Visualising what is happening in the book you are reading.

This one is absolutely brutal. Even having a basic understanding of this condition could have changed my trajectory related to anything involving fiction during school. Having every character in a book visioned as a gray amorphous blog really does make it a difficult. And realizing only later that I was the only person in class experiencing this leaves me feeling so much regret and sadness.

View on HN

I love reading fiction despite my aphantasia (and writing it), but learning I had it made it make a lot more sense why I find sensory descriptions relatively uninteresting unless the prose itself is beautiful. I'll often skip descriptions of places or people because it gives me nothing.

FWIW, I have always and still do enjoy reading fiction, and I never visualize what's happening in the book. I just read the words and enjoy the story...

For me, just different, not harder. But maybe the problem is you got some gray blobs, and I got nothing? If anything, my sense is that the absence of imagery makes book reading much easier for me. At least for plot and abstractions.

I'll confess I always skip over the described imagery in most written works, though, so it's not like I'm missing zero.

I do read about 6x faster than my wife, with better recall for the (non-visual) details. Not sure how much of that is my wife reading slow, I have many non-aphantasiac friends who read as fast as I do.

Yeah, I hear this. Reading fiction was difficult for me because it was hard to distinguish and keep track of characters. I would find myself voicing the same voice for all the people in the story.

It's important to keep track of characters when your final grade depends on it. Dialog was a bit difficult too because it was easy to lose track of who was speaking. What's interesting is that I remember enjoying reading when I was young. But that changed around 10 years I think.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com