May be the wrong thread for this, but isn’t it really common for people to not even know that have aphantasia?

I’m imagining the whole community from The Giver, where people didn’t know that they

and they didn’t even realize.

I don’t have aphantasia and I don’t particularly fancy any medium over the other, but what I often miss is sound. Music is a whole different language to either visual or conceptual as conveyed by words, whereas imagery to me feels the most direct and laziest, music can convey feelings there are neither words nor imagery for, and so often I like adaptations of written works for injecting some fitting music, and will listen to fitting music as I read books.

For those of us who don’t know what it means: “is the inability to voluntarily visualize mental images”

Basically if someone said “think of a nice round juicy red apple” people with the condition wouldn’t be able to imagine it in their mind.

I didn’t realize I had it until well into adulthood and I’ve always enjoyed reading. Even the extensive description still has meaning I just don’t see it.

You’re asking the wrong question. How do you guys without aphantasia manage to read when there’s pictures whizzing around your head all the time??

Mechanically, whenever I read about someone’s or someplace’s introduction and it describes their appearance, I’ll just skip that section. If it’s more than a sentence-long description I’ll often unconsciously just move on to the next paragraph - it’s literally meaningless to me.

I read a lot when I’m not stressed. This week, I’ve read the whole of the Robots series by Isaac Asimov (four books, around 1500 pages total). Several times, I’ve read entire books in one sitting without even moving.

I can’t really tell you if it affects my ability to enjoy books, because I don’t know how I’m “supposed” to enjoy a book. So instead I’ll just talk about why I like to read.

1. Emotion Being able to feel something that really doesn’t happen to me in my daily life. I feel much stronger emotions through reading (and films or TV as well, to a lesser extent) than I ever can about myself and the real people in my world. For example,

2. World-building This is something that I think Alastair Reynolds is really good at. He writes science fiction books that are grounded in reality, and being able to see what he imagines. Another good example is old science fiction where there’s the dichotomy between humanity having conquered space thousands of years ago and yet the cutting edge of technology developed a few years ago is recieving the news on a paper ticker tape! Seeing what what the authors imagined vs things we take for granted today but was so advanced it never even occurred to them, like the Internet.

3. Mystery / plot There’s a certain beauty to seeing the web that’s been built up over the course of a story all coming together at the end. A good example would be Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time where all the threads come together and the resolution at the end wasn’t what I expected but, in hindsight, nothing else would have done it justice.

4. Character growth Gravity Dreams by LE Modesitt is my favourite book and I don’t know why. I think it’s just that the journey the main character goes through really speaks to me and gets me thinking about my own philosophy and life.

In summary, I’ll say that you don’t have to see something to comprehend what is happening and to be touched emotionally. As for your other question, I also watch film and TV but I definitely prefer animated over live. I can get easily confused between different actors which doesn’t happen with animation for me. I find that TV or film takes less effort to enjoy, but also that I don’t enjoy it as much as a book.

I hate descriptions, and I have a really hard time when there’s more than a paragraph focusing on descriptions of what things look like.

Other than that it’s fine, though I sometimes have to trace back because I often skip parts that look description-y and some authors like to slip in some piece of crucial information.

Time spend on video medium is like 1000x more than reading.

I rarely read books, by rarely I mean I just skim all school reading materials, and only pick up random books lying around at home (that were given out for free by the public library) to read when my electronics were broken/consfiscated by parents.

I read a lot of news and wikipedia aricles tho, those are somehow just more fun than a book.

There are some adapted works that I’ve seen the adaptation of, but still haven’t read the source materials yet. I kinda just read the wikis to check any differences between the 2 mediums… 🤷‍♂️

Recently, I came across some interesting works of fiction that didn’t have an adaptation in a video medium, so I reluctantly started reading. Recursion was a fun read with the audiobook playing in background at 1.2x speed.

When I read, I usually use the sterotypical portrayal of that character’s archetype from other visual mediums to like fill in the character model and use similar scenes from visual media to paint the room and atmosphere.

I have like a “level 3” on the aphantasia scale, so like I could just barely paint the scenary.

If I do my own worldbuilding and my own story, I can sort of see the world slightly mroe clearly, like a “level 2” on the apantasia scale.