This is fantastic, thank you so much. It reminds me of the Bernard Lenoir show on France Inter back in the days. Will be spending days digging this new treasure trove from Montreal :)
Glad to help! Fehmiu's show is also good. And I should add that once I loaded the song's into Apple Music and started favoriting + adding to playlist, Apple has been able to suggest many similar songs and artists for me. I'm sure Spotify etc can do the same.
Funnily, before the "aphantasia" was a thing, I always thought that "not seeing things in my mind" and instead having just "vague geometrical images" was my superpower and maybe explained why it looks like I could think faster and more effortlessly than many of my peers during college and phd years. I thought maybe my brain didn't spend cycles on pictures and used them elsewhere. That idea was maybe influenced by vaguely recollecting (perhaps wrongly) an Einstein interview where he mentioned also having only vague geometrical images in his mind. When the term "aphantasia" was coined, I was really surprised that people with aphantasia started writing as if it was a handicap they had, as if they were diminished by lacked something that others have. Nowadays, it still trips me up a little to see it described as a 'condition', though I understand it and feel that it is probably a give and take - it is probably an enabler in some domains and a drag in others.
I, too, never really saw it as a handicap. However, looking back on my education I think I could argue that it was slightly a disadvantage.
I constantly got feedback on essays, "show -- don't tell". I remember a unit in school where they made us close our eyes while they told us a story and we had to visualize being in the story. I didn't realize that other kids didn't think the same way as me, so I just remember feeling like these exercises were pointless.
In a recent interview, I was collaborating with my interviewer who was visually imagining things in his head and explaining them to me. The interview was going rarher poorly and, once I explained that I didnt have the ability to visualize things and needed to write it down on paper, our conversation shifted and the interview went phenomenally better.
Being more open about my aphantasia has actually helped significantly, and I wish I had known about it as a kid.
Being in that situation, two things that stand out are: when thinking about a topic, I do sometimes formulate my questions or hypotheses in internal words, but the "answers" come back in non verbal form: for instance I suddenly just "know" where the flaw in the argument is, or what (counter)example I need to think more about. The other striking fact is that when I am very emotional (eg angry), the internal monologue is suddenly very vivid :)
It's really hard to describe, and in my experience, people with mental images tend to have a hard time imagining it (and people with aphantasia seem to differ on how much they use an internal monologue, etc). In a nutshell, for me the directions either 'come out of nowhere' or there is a vague feeling of 'geometrical stuff happening somewhere in my brain, in a mostly non perceptible places'.
What a beautiful and well-articulated comment! The issue of value-compatibility (cultural, social, psychological) for successful communication/relationship is immensely underestimated and there is therefore a huge lack of guidance and sensible warnings for a human starting their mating lives outside of circles perpetuating traditions. Many of us get eaten in that jungle and wake up mamed a couple of decades later... I hope your comment helps someone out there realize how important it is to spend energy on "finding your tribe" in order to "date your species" as Reid Mihalko puts it.
