posted May 12 @ 10:55 AM by Jason Kottke · gift link Aphantasia (the inability to visualize) is one of those things that I find endlessly fascinating; I’ve written about it a few times since 2016 , most recently in response to Larissa MacFarquhar’s 2025 piece for the New Yorker: Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound . Many of his correspondents, he learned, had discovered their condition very recently, after reading about it or hearing it described on the radio. Their whole lives, they had heard people talk about picturing, and imagining, and counting sheep, and visualizing beaches, and seeing in the mind’s eye, and assumed that all those idioms were only metaphors or colorful hyperbole. It was amazing how profoundly people could misunderstand one another, and assume that others didn’t mean what they were saying—how minds could wrest sense out of things that made no sense.…