I’ve come to really enjoy chatting with people with neurodivergence, or cognitive difference as I prefer to think of it, over the last few years. It may or may not be in the brain, but it is definitely in the mind. There’s something about people getting a diagnosis, or self-diagnosing, that starts them on a journey of discovery of their own minds. They think about thinking in a way that others don’t seem to and develop a language for the inner workings of their mind. It is a fascinating way to get to know people.
Here’s a little trip through part of mine.
I know when my own personal journey began although it subsequently enlightened many parts of my earlier life. The reason I sit down to write about it now is that tonight, for the very first time (not around half-past ten), I actually heard clearly with my mind’s ear while I was fully awake. It was the sound of my phone alarm; very quiet, as if it was in another room, but nonetheless as if I was hearing it with my ears. The tone was exactly as I know it to be, the pitch much more accurate than I can sing it without practicing. But my phone was right beside me resolutely doing nothing (other than perhaps listening to my life and sending anything interesting to the NSA).
It may in part to be due to the fact that I have a dehumidifier running beside me putting out what is called brown noise: like white noise but without the high frequencies. I’ve heard music on the edge of hearing before: one evening I thought the local brass band was rehearsing outside on a cold wet night but opened my front door to silence. So this may have been coming for a while.
What am I talking about?
Aphantasia is a condition whereby people are unable to visualise: they have no mind’s eye. If you’re an aphant and haven’t heard of this before, you may be thinking that no-one can do this and people who think they can see things don’t. I find it amusing to occasionally meet other aphants who flat-out deny that people can visualise. If you’re interested to know, just Google ‘the apple test’ to investigate your own place on this spectrum.
For me, I have ‘total aphantasia’; when I’m awake and conscious anyway. Earlier in life, I often wondered if chefs could imagine the taste of the recipes they were inventing, or even those that they had eaten before. Apparently, the answer is, ‘yes’. I can’t. Many people can hear music in their heads. I can’t when I’m awake. Most people can visualise to some extent: I can’t.
Not while I’m awake, anyway. I have gotten myself into very intoxicated states trying to induce hallucinations only to now realise that my mind just doesn’t do that sort of thing. I have completed a music degree and a master’s without having a mind’s ear: I think that for the profession, that may count as a disability. When I read a score, there is nothing communicated about the way it might sound in real life.
My journey into my mind really began on 26th August 2015 on reading an article on the BBC website about aphantasia. I believe I re-read the article upside down just to be sure. Indeed, it said that some people can’t visualise but, astoundingly to me, most people can. I had tried for years to conjure images in my head but finally just came to the conclusion that minds don’t do that.
But I had had some experience of this previously. There’s a moment when I am just about to fall asleep when my inner monologue quiets down and I’m just about to enter the land on of nod. For a number of years, when my kids were young, I would often be brought back to full consciousness from just that point: when a treasured Lego creation splatted on the floor after falling out of bed or the kids themselves fell out themselves. Always, there was music. Mostly it was of the ilk of ‘if it’s weird and you don’t know what it is, just call it jazz’. Although I do know that one night I woke up to Crosby, Stills and Nash singing a song that I had never heard before. All the music was, as it were, original. Nothing that I had ever heard in my waking life. I also remember that once, when I was in college (studying music) a really loud trumpet blast brought me instantly wide awake as if the trumpeter was in my bedroom: spoiler; no trumpeter. After a while, I began to think that maybe it was a car horn on the street nearby but really it would have to have been someone with a genuine trumpet as their car horn.
Which is to say that I have a mind’s ear but, until tonight, I’ve never heard it in full wakefulness.
After I read the article on the BBC, I did experiment with that point just before sleep; using a mixed-up method of self-hypnosis and mediation to try and capture the state of that moment and to see if I could experience it with my waking mind. Initially, I got a couple of really vivid shots. The first was of a leprechaun in brown monochrome: but a leprechaun of pure evil. When it flashed in front of me, I actually shouted out because it was accompanied by such a pure sense of evil: not a product of the picture I think but a simultaneous creation of some other part of my mind. I also, in a longer shot, had a small hoard of zombies shamble by and, I think, leave my mind forever. No wonder the things always freaked me out: I don’t think I had any way of processing them in my mind and so they just hung around being scary.
Which, now that I think of it, brings a much earlier edition of this condition to mind. I was staying at a friend’s house; maybe aged ten or so. I think that I may have been a bit feverish or had too much sun. In a dream, there was something, a knight I think, attacking me. I woke up (for real I think) and started trying to fight it, even though it was invisible. It was there: I was sure of it. But I couldn’t see it.
And it strikes me that this experiencing of two states of consciousness simultaneously is something that other people may do all the time. I wonder though, because it is so normal, do people realise that it is two states of consciousness? Or does that make sense in other people’s minds?
So, what is it I see? How do I see? It is a bit of an enigma to me.
I remember that, a few years ago, before beginning my aphant journey, I went to an art class, ‘From Drawing to Painting’. As usual for such things, I felt like the dunce of the class. One evening, I was separated from everyone else (for reasons I can’t remember) and drawing a gourd: a pot, not a fruit. It was really skewed; not quite Salvador Dali’s melting clocks but definitely headed in the direction. As I was drawing, the teacher came over and stood behind me, unknown to me I think. I just became aware of her as she exclaimed, ‘My God! You see everything’.
If that was today, I would think to ask her what she meant by that but, at the time, I was really just too confused to find a pertinent question. I was not at all impressed by the drawing that I was looking at.
And so, this evening, it occurred to me, after ‘hearing’ my phone that, maybe it’s not that I can’t do this. Maybe, my mind doesn’t let me.
At this stage, I need to introduce my conscious brain. Firstly, it never shuts up while I am awake unless I am particularly focused on something: in a state of ‘flow’. Inner monologue: no sound. It’s just a stream of words, usually directed at someone. (I try not to do this in real life but add alcohol and there’s a good chance that I’ll fail.)
Moreover, my conscious mind is a bossy busybody. Anything that I try to do, it tries to be in charge of – whether it has the relevant skills or not. Having failed miserably at developing my sight reading when learning an instrument, I subsequently realised that all I had had to do was just keep doing it badly and I would have gotten better: allowing the part(s) of my subconscious that are good at that sort of thing to just work it out and get on with it. But I didn’t because my conscious mind tried to do it and it was simply not up to the task of carrying on regardless.
I realise this now through my awareness of the near-sleep time. Mostly, as I am falling asleep, visuals do come. But mostly, as soon as my conscious mind becomes aware, it tries to act in some way and the visuals disappear immediately. I feel as if it is trying to grab the images. The visuals are definitely coming from somewhere else. On the occasions when I manage to maintain the dual consciousness for a while, still aware of my thoughts, but also aware of my visuals, the two have nothing to do with each other. My mind’s eye still seems to mainly be preoccupied with schlock horror: faces with bleeding eyes, ominous shadows; that sort of thing. It definitely seems to be generating its own content independent of what is going on elsewhere in my mind.
And so I now realise, like the sight reading, that when I try and visualise, or hear in my mind’s ear, or imagine a taste; I am trying to do those things with a part of my mind that is not the part that can do those things.
And then comes the question that got me writing this evening. Rather than trying to do those things itself, is my conscious mind, the part that I generally think of as ‘myself’ actively suppressing my inner creation of sensual experiences? If I ‘see everything’, is it possible that that part of my mind is trying to prevent sensory overload? I have a colleague who is on the other end of the scale from me: a beneficiary (and perhaps sufferer) of hyperphantasia. They process thought in a visual fashion and need to watch TV in order to relax: essentially, it sounds like, drowning out the inner senses. To me, that sounds like hell on earth: not the visualisation but having to watch TV to relax – most TV programmes leave me profoundly bored.
Perhaps my bossy busybody conscious mind is doing me the service of stopping me from experiencing persistent sensory overload due to what is going on in the creatively sensory parts of my mind. It may not be good or healthy for me to release these beasts from their cages because I may not be able to interact well with the outside world if there is a constant battle for attention between what is going on inside and what is going on outside.
And like in the next episode, should I write it, the point at which I realise there may be a problem is the point at which at which I have made the problem real.
The next episode, should I muster up the courage to publish it will be ‘My Inner Critic’. That’s a far more interesting journey and comes with lots of expletives.