"Oh, glory," she whispered, and went to see what lay below on that side. Passing a dip in the rock, she halted. A pool of some eerie substance was cupped there. It shimmered with green, yellow, gray, and blue lights, much like the colours that she'd seen in the sky the night before. They moved over its surface in globes, waves, or strips. Watching the pool made her giddy. She swayed, and put out a hand.

This is an excerpt from The Realms of the Gods by Tamora Pierce, a beloved fantasy novel from my childhood that I re-read recently.

Having previously been in the psychedelic world of Blood Meridian, Pierce's prose is comparatively direct. Scenes are painted economically as the romp careens along, but ocassionally, they'll give me pause to wonder: what would that actually look like?

Unfortunately, on the following aphantasia scale, I think I'm around a 2.

So imagining multicoloured rock pools is kind of tricky. At best, something appears in my mind as a flash. Something half-vision, half-feeling that fleetingly wavers in and out of existence within a fuzzy black field.^🧠

But the pools are interesting nevertheless, because they isolate colour as a single dimension of mental imagery. I'm no expert in this, but presumably, like any other skill, learning it works better if you break the problem down into parts.

a tool for practising visualizing colour

So here's a little tool to try practising exactly that. You can select a palette, practise visualizing it, and then see how far off you were. Maybe visual imagery could work like flash cards?

I have no idea if this'll work. From what I gather, there's no evidence-backed program to train one's mental imagery. One paper found that doing the above for a week had no effect on mental imagery capabilities. I also read that Sasha Chapin managed to develop mental imagery by following this course.

Hmph. 🤷

seeing both sides

I'm vaguely aware that there's an ongoing conversation regarding the "disability" status of aphantasia. Is it like deafness? Is it like tone deafness? I really don't know and I need to read more. My prior belief is: I assume we can train it and so it's more like illiteracy - something our brains aren't innately capable of (or that we're predisposed to develop "in the wild") but that can be acquired as a capability.^🪄

In any case, I don't think we're descriminating people by this.^🧑‍🔬 People with good mental imagery probably self-select for employment in visual industries and people with perfect pitch are more likely to become musicians and it all shakes out.

But it looks like it might be possible to acquire perfect pitch (especially if you start young) and if I could take a pill to get it, I would, so maybe I should try to explore my phantasiac opportunities also.

Or maybe I should do other things. When I close my eyes I see a long to-do list.