# Aphantasia, Can You Imagine?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/aphantasia-can-you-imagine/729163>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [August 28, 2015, 12:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/aphantasia-can-you-imagine/729163 "2015-08-28T12:24:40Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 3

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**Author:** ![Frylock](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ce7236/32.png) [@Frylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frylock)\
**Post date:** [September 6, 2015, 11:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/aphantasia-can-you-imagine/729163/41 "2015-09-06T23:12:20Z")

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> [@Aspidistra](#):
>
> Speaking for myself, I love all kinds of fiction, but when I first found out about the visualiser/non-visualiser split, it was a real epiphany regarding the _types_ of fiction I like. Aha! So _that’s_ why Tolkein wrote all those pages and pages and PAGES about mountains and rivers and trees - he’s not being obtuse, he’s writing for his constituency. There are all these people out there who actually see rich vivid images as a result of reading this sort of stuff, while I’m crawling through it like a woman in a desert whispering “Dialogue! …must … have … dialogue …”

Yup, I’m a weak visualizer–I visualize, but only in brief flashes and it takes something of an act of will–and I skip every paragraph which looks like it’s just going to be visual descriptions. This means I miss some important things sometimes…

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