psychology

Hyperphantasia…

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I have recently been writing about the differences between two people living together with Aphantasia and Hyperphantasia (myself and my husband), but just wanted to do a small piece focusing on how it feels to have Hyperphantasia.

Visual imagery has been a big part of my life, for my learning, experiences and memories. I didn’t know there were varying degrees of this and now wonder how much this has affected my general interactions with people. For a start I have more hobbies than anyone I know, I need constant stimulation or thoughts to have as my brain feels like it is going ten to the dozen all the time. I never understood why so few people if any had the same mental rate of processing and interest in things as I did. I thought I was neurotic, people told me I was neurotic.

Now I suspect differently. From learning about various things I believe I come into the category of mild hyperthymesia, full hyperphantasia and chronesthesia (capability of mental time travel). All these labels actually well describe why there is so much going in on my head. Like doing a days work, while writing a book, and watching multiple movies, and having conversations – all at the same time as trying to engage in what is actually going on. Occasionally it gets very crowded and jumbled in there, but I have worked on systems, methods and mechanisms to live with it and try and make the best of it. But understanding it is helping. And some things calm and focus my brain to minimize it – like my job, singing and watching a good program. The downside of that is, if the program is that good, it will stay with me after and forever, getting logged in the giant filing room I have inside my head. It’s the same with songs or lyrics (or sometimes just an average phrase), they can get stuck on repeat in my mind, even if I haven’t heard them for an age.

I have had to make a big effort to dissociate emotions from these visuals though, for some that may sound odd, why wouldn’t you want to feel? Somewhere along the line, I felt having traumatic memories or invasive thoughts with imagery disturbing and didn’t want it, it wasn’t productive or helpful. I can’t stop the pictures, but I could work on how they are then processed in mind.

The constant visualization isn’t only confined to my waking hours though. Dreaming is something I have come to see both as an affliction and a welcome escape. The vividness and memory of these dreams is very intense, sometimes following me through the day. Sometimes my dreams are anxious, tiring and stressful, so I have to ask myself, do I feel anxious because of my dream, or was it an anxious dream because of my subconscious trying to tell me something? Or are they just directly influenced by what you see and watch and there is no hidden meaning at all? I am on the fence on that one, either way, they aren’t very settling but are great for fiction writing and ideas, just not for having a restful nights sleep.

For now I am just trying to keep up with my brain and will continue to work on the hows and whys of it all…

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Here is the full book that came of writing about this subject, if it happens to be of interest.

(c) K Wicks

Different Futures…

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Another excerpt from my work in progress…

Before we knew of Aphanstasia we decided to move to Spain. It was a leap of faith, we hadn’t been married long and tried to think of the best way to use our resources to have a good life. We discussed everything and we moved. It was hard and there was a lot to organise and sort out, but because he functioned great in the moment, it seemed a breeze really.

Only a small hiccup of a drunk taxi driver at the last hurdle trying to get to the airport to leave. But another one saved the day and we got there. The drama that unfolded when we were there though couldn’t have been anticipated and was caused mainly by a long list of shoddy agents and bad neighbours. We didn’t really have a chance to settle down and find our feet to plan anything. Instead going from one idea to another and having to change it every other week because of what we had found out, or how we had been treated. It was extremely frustrating. And it was in these frustrating times that we stumbled across this major difference in our thought process. He wasn’t planning ahead at all, he had no concept of our future in Spain and never had. That kind of explained why he always seemed to have objections to things, he speaks his mind at the time, there’s no saving it for later. It can make him seem quite outspoken, but it really isn’t on purpose I now know.

I have to be honest though, when I realised I was on my own with planning our future, it sealed the deal for me. I was already struggling and had thought I wanted to come home, I just didn’t want to ruin it for him. But deep down I must have known we weren’t going to be staying in Spain. I was grossly under prepared going there anyway (I can’t even speak the language), and knew this was the right thing to do.

I couldn’t do it for us both not on home soil. I had spent over thirty years working out how to function in this society, it sounds awful to say, but I actually felt too old to go through it all again. I needed the support of familiarity – not people, or friends as they are thin on the ground, but where I recognised. I realised that was my reference point, my safety zone. I felt like a duck out of water and wanted to correct it as soon as possible. I don’t often live with my mistakes once I have acknowledged them.

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(c) K Wicks (Photography taken in Spain)

Anxiety & Mental Time Travel…

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The following is an excerpt from a book I am currently writing, initially to observe the differences between an Aphantasiac (my husband) and a Hyper-Aphantasiac (myself) but it has revealed quite a bit more to me about how the brain works than I had realised. By stumbling across the term Mental Time Travel and understanding and really seeing how it has impacted my life, has given me another perspective.

‘My anxiety and previous attempts to avoid it at all costs have caused me much embarrassment in my life. So as I got older, I chose to acknowledge what it is about the present and future I imagine to be so scary or nerve wracking and try and deal with that.

Society alone can give you anxiety, a stressful home life or working environment can trigger these emotions and feelings too. But if on the way through your life, what if you didn’t get the necessary experience to understand all this and know what was going on. What if you didn’t ever develop coping mechanisms or recognise what might be a weakness in yourself or potential strength? Then how can you hope to make it easier for yourself and work through it? This is the type of question I ask myself, then go to work trying to unravel what it really means.

What I did work out was to spend less time worrying and trying to predict the outcome of things I hadn’t done yet or hadn’t yet happened. This is where I feel mental time travel has held me back a bit, I missed out on a lot of experiences because I couldn’t stop theorising what would happen and how I would feel. I have a good memory for feelings, so unfortunately I still come across an event or idea that would require me to be in the presence of ‘people’ and I just can’t do it – however much I might want to be a part of the subject matter. Not because I am always anxious, but because now I have experience to know I just don’t want to do it and will be awkward and can seem rude. There are some things I just like the idea of, but I ‘walk’ myself through and it does always end the same. I’m bored, out of place and want to go home.

This isn’t negative, this is realistic. I am not a happy go lucky person, and I can deal with crowds if I have to, and I can go to conventions or festivals if I want. I have just worked out I don’t want to, I am not that person. I just tried to be for a really long time. I don’t socialise now at all, have very limited family and keep myself to myself mostly in real life, and I am happier and more stable for it. But it is a shame to think that in order to have a quiet enjoyable life you can’t have people generally in it. But I know that’s because people are the random element I cannot foresee, predict, control or understand fully. I myself am included in that.’

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(c) K Wicks – words and photography

Growing up…

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Excerpt from The Willing Observer

‘I was still quite disillusioned though, I was a child. I understood the playing field as far as my age group and maybe a couple of years above and below me but I had no concept of the ‘grown up’ world. I believed naively that they had everything planned and knew exactly what was going on and where they were going. This oversight or lack of understanding is only natural for a child or young adult, but when I realised they don’t have all the answers, I took it as a massive failure on my part, to not see the whole world as it was and to have allowed myself a false sense of security. It shook my confidence greatly at the time, and I then spent years trying to make up for it before I understood that everyone else was making it up as they went along too.

I internally punished myself for being either too involved or too separated, not able to assimilate the emotional and the logical to work together as one. I couldn’t quite grasp analysing a situation while going through it, instead electing to be distant and outside what should be a personal experience for the sake of study. I know now that this was due to a combination of me growing up, my thought process beginning to form and of trying to understand myself. It was about the brain developing and learning new experiences, but it felt again like failure at the time when I did not seem to see or feel things as others did. But I did not always take this failure as defeat’.

 

 

 

(c) MKW Publishing

Aphantasia – a difference in mind

~ MKW Publishing ~ 2 Comments

Sometimes you discover something which changes the very way in which you think about things, it may be a new idea, information or a different viewpoint. Or you may find that things are not what you thought they once were. Reality, truth and perspective are and can be very personal, and while we try and untangle the workings of the human mind, we are finding there is much to learn along the way

This is now also a published book available on Amazon –

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(c) K L Wicks

Aphantasia #2

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It’s been nearly a year now since I learned of this and have been trying to understand Aphantasia, i now know it is in varying degrees across the board for the people who have it, partial for some, full for others. I try as best i can to understand what it is to not have visualisation, to not imagine at all and to not picture anything in ones head, its a concept i had not considered but now makes perfect sense.

For full Aphantasiacs, the difference from partial seems to be startling too ( i can only comment on full as that’s been my experience). There is no escape from the stark reality before you, what you see is all there is – without dreams and mental pictures to carry you away, what you see really is all there is. I have the ability to replay movies in my head, run through what i saw mentally, recall faces, remember looking at lists, posters, people, i can see it all in my mind. But trying to explain that to someone who doesn’t, well, i have been told it sounds like the most alien thing in the world.

“You can play movies in your head?!” Yes. I can retrieve almost anything i have seen in my life, whether i remember it correctly is another matter, but i have something there. I can picture all of my family, past and present, i can imagine i’m looking in the fridge when i am trying to remember what i need to buy (when i forget my shopping list). I use it for so much, and also i realise, for escapism. Even just standing in line or waiting is assisted by my mind wandering, occupying itself with either something i want to do later, of something i might have watched the night before.

So, looking backwards and forwards is natural for me, spending possibly very little time in the present. Reviewing what was, and speculating on what might be. But not for one who doesn’t imagine – there is nothing to ‘look’ back on, and the future doesn’t exist. So living in the now takes on a whole new meaning, and seems that it can lead to immense impatience and frustration with the world and people. Mostly the people who seem to be ‘in a different world’. It’s because they actually are – which was quite a terrifying revelation to one who doesn’t ‘drift away’ in mind – while driving, cooking, walking, and everything else we do, most of us probably are mentally somewhere else. “So no-one is really in reality or sees the world as it is?” And that was the terrifying bit, the reality of that question.

I’m still learning on this and will keep at it.

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(c) K L Wicks