quite recently! a few years back, when I read a philosophy piece that mentioned it and I realised OH THAT'S ME! although I had got part of the way there (eg one time I realised I couldn't remember the colour of the carpet at my parents' house and thought relatively hard about how I really should've been able to do that etc). has totally changed a load of things for me (eg realising that most people are MUCH better at recognising other people than me has made me change some stuff and also just tell people) I also enjoy thinking about it
I always felt bad for not remembering things like how to get somewhere. Now I let myself off the hook. I was floored that nobody in the literacy community seems to know about aphantasia. I have now written some notes to some people. I don't know when a child should know about this difference. I'm looking forward to those studies, eventually.
ditto! i now just accept that i will never be good at knowing where anything is or who anyone is, unless i've been there or met them lots of times! the bad thing for me was thinking about all the times that i avoided going to say hi to someone because i wasnt sure it was them, but had felt ok about it because i assumed they also werent sure it was me, and realising they probably were totally sure it was me and thought i was being rude.. i had no idea that most people are really good at these things! Cant wait to read the studies..
Interesting. That's actually how I knew I had aphantasia. I remembered all those exercises "picture the character in your head".... Never really hampered me. I could write down characteristics, big nose, blue eyes, yellow jacket... without actually seeing it. I just assumed it was meant metaphorically.
My hunch is aphantasiac people are more apt to confuse they're/their/there than others. By contrast, I'd bet they almost never confuse lose/loose. My brother said he confuses words, because letters have different colors to him, which is a completely foreign concept for me.
Great piece. I wrote a response to Freddie's Phonics piece just this morning, and saw your link in the comments. I'm familiar with the importance of cognitive load and encoding, but I tried to pitch my piece to laymen and parents. My particular angle was acute dyslexia. My brother was lucky enough to have a teach for a mother. He was diagnosed at age 6, 45 years ago. He has a B.Sc. and a Masters. He was one of the lucky ones. The inclusion at any cost dogma causes real harms. My brother was included, but he also required specialist resources. My take is that balanced literacy may be an attempt to provide universalised classroom practice which caters to the far broader phenomenon of mild dyslexia, when a differentiated approach with special needs resourcing focusing on acute dyslexics would be the preferred approach.
Here in the UK our national curriculum ditched balanced literacy in 2006, thank God! It's still prevalent in Scotland though. Anyway, if you're interested here's the essay: https://substack.com/home/post/p-176113078
I am so glad to read more about where students with dyslexia fit in -- while I was writing my piece I was cognizant I couldn't speak to those needs and styles. It would be interesting to know the covariance of dyslexia and aphantasia as well. Thank you! The best part of writing is expanding the circle of people interested in a topic.
I just read your blurb. AI still struggles with creativity and scepticism. It’s an incredible research tool though. I love that I can ask it to use statistical maths to dissect studies. I find one really has to wrestle it to get to sandbox settings. In order to get past the standard platitudes on any subject, one really has to demonstrate advanced domain knowledge. It’s probably a PR shield.
Have you noticed how so many of the more interesting public intellectuals apply a cross-disciplinary approach. Jonathan Haidt would certainly fit the bill. Steven Pinker. Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Philosophy also seems to be a must. I think it works the same way within domains. The other thing my brother struggles with is that his working memory doesn’t have a many spaces as a normal person (it’s usually seven). He probably has six, but for some dyslexics slots in working memory can be as low as five.
And I know what you mean. one of the great things about substack, or earlier software packages like Discourse, is that it can be a form of distributed learning. I occasionally play Devil’s advocate just to hear arguments I haven’t encountered.
One of the first things I thought about is how do you dream? I would be interested to hear about your experiences.
I don't read any of those writers except Taleb. They write for their pocketbooks, not for readers. They are not interesting, they never give credit except to each other.
I do not read anyone you mention. Nudge is evil. Pardon, but when everyone reads the same banal squish (and your recommendations = tide of middling sociology bestsellers) we get what we get for political leaders. Drink of better waters.
One of my favourite books recently was The Master and his Emissary. Robert Plomin’s book Blueprint is a great introduction to how the polygenic approach is unravelling heritability in ways which wouldn’t have been possible before.
The only reason I mentioned Thaler is because there is some crossover with Taleb- the economics. Ok. How about William Easterly, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Douglas Murray? On Substack, Nigel Biggar is great. He presents a more accurate picture of history, without the revisionism.
So much of the phonics/whole language debate repeats the central fallacy of “learning styles”: that there are personal, optimizable methods to learning (or reading) which are independent of the substance being learned (or read).
Your account of aphantasia doesn’t present us with a different “learning style,” but with *learning itself as a function of meaning*—for which there are no hacks or shortcuts.
(This is one of my favorite examples for students of good argument, which they always find jarring but come to appreciate: https://youtu.be/855Now8h5Rs)
• Does reverse aphantasia exist? Individuals who automatically visualize words or struggle to see the code behind language?
• How important will seeing the code behind AI language become versus visualization? Both seem valuable—one enables deeper thought interaction with AI, the other operates orthogonally to LLMs.
Final point on visualization in education: this may be an anachronism from the pre-printing world where complex visualizations served as memory tools. The practice faded with inexpensive books acting as external memory.
I'm sure the "Miss. Miracle" is hugely influenced by phonics oriented instruction. For reading, focus more on decoding, not visualization. Possibly 60% of the reading score improvement is phonics, tho I understand other reforms are also included and have some influence.
There was an important selection-bias critique by Freddie:
>>in defiance of a hundred years of experience in large-scale education policy in the developed world, some pedagogical tweaks have enabled educators in Mississippi and a couple other union-hating red states to ignore the conditions that have caused these interventions to fail again and again and again. <<
I'm wondering how often aphantasia folks have been excluded in reform tests to make the reforms look better.
It wouldn’t be deliberate, but if such kids were taught reading by visualizations, and were thus below grade level, I can imagine that 80-90% of third graders with aphantasia, especially avg & low IQ, would fail. And in Miss. be held back, but in most US schools just be advanced despite failing.
It’s no diagnostic for it, but all who are failing should get IQ tests and maybe visualization tests/ aphantasia. VVIQ.
I am also a writer with aphantasia. I had no difficulty at all learning to read. I didn't know other people could literally visualize pictures in their minds until just a few years ago. Telling children to visualize when they don't have that ability will just cause frustration and confusion.
Fabulous points Hollis! The persistent use of visualization pedagogy in classrooms, despite the evidence from neuroscience and models like SVR, is a massive instructional lag. Mississippi’s results should finally force the global education market to abandon this 'orphaned practice' and embrace language as structure/code.
This is very interesting. The failure of whole-language methods has been evident for a long time now. If whole-language advocates reference Coleridge’s theory of imagination (esemplastic imagination), they are misapplying it. Coleridge’s theory deals explicitly with the act of creating — a poem, a text, etc. It has no application to the act of learning itself. It is based on those who already know how to read. Anyone who attempts to find similarities between them does so out of thin air.
Since I teach ear training I’ve actually started screening students for auditory aphantasia and I’ve "diagnosed" a few students who didn’t know they had it because they didn’t know it existed! (Btw, I was doing my MM at Peabody when you were still there, nice to find you here).
So interesting. My respect for your grasp of words immense as you describe your learning process. A family member has been a reading teacher for decades and continues to be a reading coach. I look forward to sharing your insights and research with her. Thank you for your passion for teaching and making Herculean attempts to ensure the students’ reach exceeds only one way to grasp.
nice piece! I have aphantasia too!
!!!! When did you learn of it?? It’s fascinating and changed everything for me. Has it for you??
quite recently! a few years back, when I read a philosophy piece that mentioned it and I realised OH THAT'S ME! although I had got part of the way there (eg one time I realised I couldn't remember the colour of the carpet at my parents' house and thought relatively hard about how I really should've been able to do that etc). has totally changed a load of things for me (eg realising that most people are MUCH better at recognising other people than me has made me change some stuff and also just tell people) I also enjoy thinking about it
I always felt bad for not remembering things like how to get somewhere. Now I let myself off the hook. I was floored that nobody in the literacy community seems to know about aphantasia. I have now written some notes to some people. I don't know when a child should know about this difference. I'm looking forward to those studies, eventually.
ditto! i now just accept that i will never be good at knowing where anything is or who anyone is, unless i've been there or met them lots of times! the bad thing for me was thinking about all the times that i avoided going to say hi to someone because i wasnt sure it was them, but had felt ok about it because i assumed they also werent sure it was me, and realising they probably were totally sure it was me and thought i was being rude.. i had no idea that most people are really good at these things! Cant wait to read the studies..
How are you with recognizing voices?
Interesting. That's actually how I knew I had aphantasia. I remembered all those exercises "picture the character in your head".... Never really hampered me. I could write down characteristics, big nose, blue eyes, yellow jacket... without actually seeing it. I just assumed it was meant metaphorically.
My hunch is aphantasiac people are more apt to confuse they're/their/there than others. By contrast, I'd bet they almost never confuse lose/loose. My brother said he confuses words, because letters have different colors to him, which is a completely foreign concept for me.
Great piece. I wrote a response to Freddie's Phonics piece just this morning, and saw your link in the comments. I'm familiar with the importance of cognitive load and encoding, but I tried to pitch my piece to laymen and parents. My particular angle was acute dyslexia. My brother was lucky enough to have a teach for a mother. He was diagnosed at age 6, 45 years ago. He has a B.Sc. and a Masters. He was one of the lucky ones. The inclusion at any cost dogma causes real harms. My brother was included, but he also required specialist resources. My take is that balanced literacy may be an attempt to provide universalised classroom practice which caters to the far broader phenomenon of mild dyslexia, when a differentiated approach with special needs resourcing focusing on acute dyslexics would be the preferred approach.
Here in the UK our national curriculum ditched balanced literacy in 2006, thank God! It's still prevalent in Scotland though. Anyway, if you're interested here's the essay: https://substack.com/home/post/p-176113078
I am so glad to read more about where students with dyslexia fit in -- while I was writing my piece I was cognizant I couldn't speak to those needs and styles. It would be interesting to know the covariance of dyslexia and aphantasia as well. Thank you! The best part of writing is expanding the circle of people interested in a topic.
I just read your blurb. AI still struggles with creativity and scepticism. It’s an incredible research tool though. I love that I can ask it to use statistical maths to dissect studies. I find one really has to wrestle it to get to sandbox settings. In order to get past the standard platitudes on any subject, one really has to demonstrate advanced domain knowledge. It’s probably a PR shield.
Have you noticed how so many of the more interesting public intellectuals apply a cross-disciplinary approach. Jonathan Haidt would certainly fit the bill. Steven Pinker. Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Philosophy also seems to be a must. I think it works the same way within domains. The other thing my brother struggles with is that his working memory doesn’t have a many spaces as a normal person (it’s usually seven). He probably has six, but for some dyslexics slots in working memory can be as low as five.
And I know what you mean. one of the great things about substack, or earlier software packages like Discourse, is that it can be a form of distributed learning. I occasionally play Devil’s advocate just to hear arguments I haven’t encountered.
One of the first things I thought about is how do you dream? I would be interested to hear about your experiences.
I don't read any of those writers except Taleb. They write for their pocketbooks, not for readers. They are not interesting, they never give credit except to each other.
I think Haidt has been socially useful on the smartphone/social media issue. It's been developmentally disastrous for kids.
You might like Nudge by Thaler & Sunstein. The technology has been misapplied though- from sludge (commercialised nudging) to nudging using fear.
I do not read anyone you mention. Nudge is evil. Pardon, but when everyone reads the same banal squish (and your recommendations = tide of middling sociology bestsellers) we get what we get for political leaders. Drink of better waters.
One of my favourite books recently was The Master and his Emissary. Robert Plomin’s book Blueprint is a great introduction to how the polygenic approach is unravelling heritability in ways which wouldn’t have been possible before.
The only reason I mentioned Thaler is because there is some crossover with Taleb- the economics. Ok. How about William Easterly, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Douglas Murray? On Substack, Nigel Biggar is great. He presents a more accurate picture of history, without the revisionism.
So much of the phonics/whole language debate repeats the central fallacy of “learning styles”: that there are personal, optimizable methods to learning (or reading) which are independent of the substance being learned (or read).
Your account of aphantasia doesn’t present us with a different “learning style,” but with *learning itself as a function of meaning*—for which there are no hacks or shortcuts.
(This is one of my favorite examples for students of good argument, which they always find jarring but come to appreciate: https://youtu.be/855Now8h5Rs)
A couple curiosity-based questions:
• Does reverse aphantasia exist? Individuals who automatically visualize words or struggle to see the code behind language?
• How important will seeing the code behind AI language become versus visualization? Both seem valuable—one enables deeper thought interaction with AI, the other operates orthogonally to LLMs.
Final point on visualization in education: this may be an anachronism from the pre-printing world where complex visualizations served as memory tools. The practice faded with inexpensive books acting as external memory.
These are good questions and why we need more research on aphantasia and literacy!
I'm sure the "Miss. Miracle" is hugely influenced by phonics oriented instruction. For reading, focus more on decoding, not visualization. Possibly 60% of the reading score improvement is phonics, tho I understand other reforms are also included and have some influence.
There was an important selection-bias critique by Freddie:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/there-are-no-miracles-in-education
>>in defiance of a hundred years of experience in large-scale education policy in the developed world, some pedagogical tweaks have enabled educators in Mississippi and a couple other union-hating red states to ignore the conditions that have caused these interventions to fail again and again and again. <<
I'm wondering how often aphantasia folks have been excluded in reform tests to make the reforms look better.
I'm curious: How would the people conducting the tests identify the people with aphantasia so they could exclude them?
Thank you for being explicit about this ...
It wouldn’t be deliberate, but if such kids were taught reading by visualizations, and were thus below grade level, I can imagine that 80-90% of third graders with aphantasia, especially avg & low IQ, would fail. And in Miss. be held back, but in most US schools just be advanced despite failing.
It’s no diagnostic for it, but all who are failing should get IQ tests and maybe visualization tests/ aphantasia. VVIQ.
Yes! Everyone should have a VVIQ. Excellent idea.
That is an excellent question.
I am also a writer with aphantasia. I had no difficulty at all learning to read. I didn't know other people could literally visualize pictures in their minds until just a few years ago. Telling children to visualize when they don't have that ability will just cause frustration and confusion.
Good to know you! I’d love to hear more about your experience coming to be a writer.
I was an English major. After graduation, I needed a job and writing was the only thing I knew how to do. I never considered doing anything else.
Fabulous points Hollis! The persistent use of visualization pedagogy in classrooms, despite the evidence from neuroscience and models like SVR, is a massive instructional lag. Mississippi’s results should finally force the global education market to abandon this 'orphaned practice' and embrace language as structure/code.
This is very interesting. The failure of whole-language methods has been evident for a long time now. If whole-language advocates reference Coleridge’s theory of imagination (esemplastic imagination), they are misapplying it. Coleridge’s theory deals explicitly with the act of creating — a poem, a text, etc. It has no application to the act of learning itself. It is based on those who already know how to read. Anyone who attempts to find similarities between them does so out of thin air.
Since I teach ear training I’ve actually started screening students for auditory aphantasia and I’ve "diagnosed" a few students who didn’t know they had it because they didn’t know it existed! (Btw, I was doing my MM at Peabody when you were still there, nice to find you here).
Do you dream?
So interesting. My respect for your grasp of words immense as you describe your learning process. A family member has been a reading teacher for decades and continues to be a reading coach. I look forward to sharing your insights and research with her. Thank you for your passion for teaching and making Herculean attempts to ensure the students’ reach exceeds only one way to grasp.