This is a living blog post. I will keep adding links to the list as I write new introspective descriptions or find good ones by others.

TL;DR

The way you experience reality and life inside your head differs more than you would think from the way the next person experiences it. We should think and talk more about this very important truth.

At the bottom of this page is a list of deep introspective writing curated to uncover just such differences.

Jump directly to the list.

Maybe We're All Naked and We Know It

I had to live more than thirty-five years and go through an existential epiphany about my own brain before I learned to do any kind of introspection. Prior to learning about my aphantasia (the total lack of mental images), I never even considered the quality of my consciousness. The idea that consciousness could vary substantially from person to person simply didn't cross my mind. The way I felt seemed obvious to the point of transparency.

But my experience is, of course, different from others in many ways. Everyone else, too, seems to be unique in their combination of inner experiences. I'm talking not only about well-known spectra like autism and ADHD, but also traits like synesthesia (the mixing of senses), savant tendencies, different abilities with and approaches to words and numbers, and many other more-or-less-studied variations.

The sense I get from talking about this stuff with many people is that we've only scratched the surface of how exquisitely alien the world would feel if only one could engage with it out of a different skull. Even science is far from uncovering it all.

Why did it take me so long to realize this, and why is everyone so surprised (sometimes outright suspicious) when they first hear about people without mental imagery, or episodic memories, or an inner monologue?

Perhaps we're in a special case of pluralistic ignorance, also known as the Emperor's New Clothes effect. Even if you sense that a certain inner experience of yours—say, the way the color red contrasts with green—is different from other people, if no one around you ever mentions the possibility of such difference, your social instincts will nudge you to assume that it doesn't really exist. So you will not talk about it, for fear of sounding absurd or mad, and in doing so you will perpetuate the effect for everyone else, too.

It's not a coincidence, I think, that even color-blindness, something easy to detect with ultra-low-tech tests, was never mentioned in writing until 1798, when Dalton wrote Extraordinary Facts relating to the Vision of Colours. Compare that to differences in more subtle phenomena like imagination and dreams, and it's easy to see how it could still take centuries before we manage to verbalize the whole kaleidoscope of human experience.

If we really are in a group illusion of this scale, then it's a very important topic to study and shed light on. Who knows how many conflicts, big and small, could be averted if we learned, as a species, to account for these unconscious differences in worldview? How many endless debates and misunderstandings and ideological fractures would disappear if we all knew to adjust and clarify our assumptions based on who we're talking to?

The only way to expose the emperor's farcical parade is to shamelessly declare his nakedness to the masses. We need more people writing about what goes on inside their heads. That's especially hard for introspection about mental processes, because we don't even have a vocabulary yet to express that kind of variation. Nevertheless, the conversations I've joined about aphantasia and other neurodiverse traits gives me optimism. The vocabulary emerges naturally as more and more people do this kind of exercise.

These are not inherently indescribable topics: they're simply under-described.

The (Growing) List of Introspective Descriptions

Below I'll curate, on an ongoing basis, a collection of all my attempts at describing my own inner experience, as well as links to other people's great introspective statements. (It has very few entries now, but stay tuned for more in the next months.)

The expectation is that each of these descriptions will provoke at least one of three reactions in each reader: some will find them unbelievably strange, others will find the content banal, and still others will feel as if they have found a sibling they never knew existed. Either reaction is useful, because it's the differences and similarities that we need to map.

Please share your own experience! If I get enough pertinent testimonies, I will share them (with due permission and anonymization) on this blog. I'm also accepting links to other notable depictions, to be added to the list.

You can write me by replying to any of Aether Mug's emails, or by writing to: introspection@ + this website's domain.

The List

Written by Me

• Aphantasia: brief description of what it's like to imagine without pictures.
• Aphantasia Is No Creativity-Killer: on self-perception of creativity with aphantasia.
• My Brain Doesn't Picture Things (Nautilus Magazine): more about aphantasia and participating in MRI experiments, as well as the related science.
• Boxed: things I learned after lying in an MRI machine for 30 hours.
• Reading Blood Meridian with Aphantasia: what reading fiction is like without mental imagery.

Written by Others

• My Head as a Lake: reflection from someone who noticed as a child that her imagination worked differently.
• Feynman's interview: about the differences in how people count mentally.
• The chapter titled "Persistence of vision: a journal" in Oliver Sacks' book The Mind's Eye describes his experience with a melanoma in his eye, and the strange visual effects that followed his operation.
• Consciousness, Qualia and Internal Monologues: video essay about consciousness in general, but Roper describes his subjective experience roughly between 5:26 and 12:00.
• Is Everyone Conscious in the Same Way?: philosophical video essay, but Roper describes his inner imagery and lack of an inner monologue in the first 19 minutes.
• Codebook for Descriptive Experience Sampling nomothetic uses: comprehensive academic description of the various modalities of inner speech.
• An animation showing what a thought looks like for someone without Aphantasia and followup post: someone who is able to visualize, trying to convey what it's like to those who aren't.
• Many interesting descriptions scattered in the comments on subreddits like r/Aphantasia and r/Synesthesia. Too many to list, but here is an example, and another one.
• Born on a Blue Day, by Daniel Tammet: excellent description of what life is like as an autistic savant with Asperger's.
• Thinking in Pictures: another deep demonstration of what it's like to experience the world as an autistic person.