My Head as a Lake

Marco's note: This post is a contribution by Marie Cosgrove-Davies to Aether Mug's List of Introspective Descriptions. I'm always very interested in other people's stories of inner discovery, because, as Marie writes, each brain experiences the world in a different way. In my case, learning about aphantasia was a surprise. Not so for Marie.

I don’t have many memories from my life—they just don’t stick to my brain—but I remember the moment when I realized that other people’s minds were different from mine.

“Close your eyes, and picture yourself on a beach.” My second-grade teacher was leading the class in a visualization exercise. “You can hear the waves crash, and feel the sun on your face.” I was an obedient child, so I sat quietly, eyes closed, as… nothing happened. But the rest of the class was so still, and my teacher knew what she was doing. Something must have been happening for them.

As a 7-year-old, I didn’t really make much of this realization. It wasn’t until college that I started talking with other people about what went on in their minds. I developed a series of questions I’d ask: “When you’re thinking, what’s going on inside your head? Is there a voice? Are there several? Do you see pictures? Diagrams?” Usually, they’d stare at me and say they didn’t know, then come back after a few days of observation to tell me their answers.

I found more questions: “When you’re reading a novel, what’s happening in your mind?” People told me that a voice read them the words, that they saw images like a picture book, that they heard the characters speaking, that it played out like a movie. This all sounded remarkable and strange. Sometimes I’d ask a follow-up question about reading nonfiction, but the responses were usually less interesting (diagrams, mechanisms, tabular data).

Later I found one more question, to try to suss out the crispness of the pictures in their heads: “Imagine an elephant. Do you see it clearly?” “Yes,” they'd say. “Is the top of the ear above or below the eye?” Some people answered immediately; some people, who a moment ago had said they had a clear picture, were unsure. My favorite answer, from a friend whose inner life sounds way more fun than mine, was “I don’t know, it’s already flown away.”

I’ve had this conversation dozens of times but never bothered to look at a picture of an elephant to see what the correct answer is. For my purposes, it doesn’t matter—I’m curious about how confident people are in their answers. I wouldn’t remember the “right” answer anyway.

Sometimes, people would turn the question around, and ask what happened inside my mind. This happened less often than you might think—people are self-absorbed—and I always struggled to articulate it. “There’s nothing happening in there,” I’d tell them. Occasionally, they’d tell me their mind was the same, but more often I could see them trying to grasp how I could be sitting in front of them, breathing and talking, with such limitations.

Eventually I started to describe the inside of my head as a lake - the surface could be placid or fierce, but either way I couldn’t see below, to where things happened. My mind responds to stimuli but without them tends to sit quietly. I don’t know what I’m going to say until I’ve said it; I “think through” things in conversation. Yes, I can say words inside my head, but the level of effort feels about the same as saying them out loud, so I mostly do it if I’m trying to translate, or trying to phrase something just so. There are no pictures, no smells, no tastes, and few sounds. Songs do sometimes get stuck in my head, but they don’t stay there - usually I wind up humming or singing them, and it's never the orchestral extravaganza that some people report—only the melody.

Some people tell me it sounds restful, meditative. Reading and hearing about what it can be like inside other people’s brains, I usually agree. The articles on “negative self-talk,” for instance, indicate that some people have an uncontrollable voice talking in their head saying bad things. If I make a mistake or hurt someone, it sticks with me as an ambiently bad feeling of regret… for a few days, maybe a week. After that the feeling, and the memory, fade and fall like a dead leaf.

Some brains seem to spend untold hours ruminating, thinking through how they would have done things differently, nurturing old grudges going back to kindergarten. I can barely remember yesterday, much less last week, unprompted. Even if I wanted to dwell on past indignities it would take a concerted effort to record and recall them.

Others’ minds seem to feed them uncontrollable, scary images of what their future might be. Last week I walked home alone at night through a graveyard; it was as atmospheric as it sounds. I get the impression that for some, the experience would have been paralyzing, intolerable, full of fears of what might go wrong. Yes, I startled at the noise when a deer crashed away through the undergrowth, but mostly I was warming my cold hands in my pockets, watching for bumps in the path, looking at the moon.

I don’t mean to seem smug, or superior. I’m not claiming any of this is actionable. “Get a new brain” is a challenging suggestion, and it’s not clear to me that cognition is mutable. These are impressions of what it is like to have a different mind. Most articles and essays tend to focus on negative experiences, things people want to change or fix, so that’s the data I have to go on.

Not having these specific experiences doesn't mean I never feel tired, or depressed, or frustrated. In fact, I’ve had trouble completing this essay because of just those feelings. I’m not very good at understanding myself, though - I don’t have the visibility. I figure out what I’m feeling the same way an external observer would. Examining my energy levels, my responses to things around me, my motivation. Am I abrupt or frustrated in conversations? Do I mostly want to lie down and snuggle a cat? Maybe I could improve my self-awareness with therapy, but that hasn’t happened yet, and I’m not that optimistic.

Maybe a decade ago I came across new research on a condition called “aphantasia” and recognized in it what I already knew about myself. Like other aphantasics whose writing I’ve read, I have poor episodic memory, trouble connecting with my emotions, and have long considered myself to be un-creative. It's interesting, although not immediately impactful to my life, to learn this term. To recognize that these traits are part of my make-up, like hair color or shoe size, and like hair color or shoe size may be somewhat alterable, but difficult to change dramatically or permanently.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from my decades of discussions with friends, family, and acquaintances about how their minds work, it’s that everyone’s cognition is different, often in fascinating ways. The most common thread is that almost everyone assumes that other people’s minds work the same way as theirs… and they’re shocked to learn that this isn’t true. ●

Bio

Marie Cosgrove-Davies lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, with her husband and three cats. She enjoys gardening, reading, taking cat photos, buying strange objects at thrift stores, and dabbling in assorted other activities (sewing, choral singing, hiking). In her spare time she is a product manager for a small software company.