Aphantasia

I’ve been reading about aphantasia, or the inability to visualize mental imagery. I was surprised to learn that for those of us without any visual impairments, the ability to visualize imagery still differs greatly among us all.

When recalling a person, place or thing, some of us visualize that thing in crisp detail. Some of us imagine vague outlines. And some of us have no images at all.

What would the past be without images, where would a sense of self derive from? What is time, apart from an accumulation of these images?

It’s easy from my position to conceive of aphantasia as a loss, but I begin to wonder who bears the greater loss, really—the person with the ability to dredge up the past in all its detail, or the person who must be immersed in beauty to see it at all?