Aphantasia: A Personal Reflection

The talk introduces aphantasia, the inability to form mental images, and the speaker's experience of living with it. He explains that he assumed people who described "seeing" things in their heads were speaking figuratively until he learned otherwise a few years ago. Drawing on a long career as a pathologist and teacher, he presents the talk as a personal reflection rather than a formal study.

The middle section looks at everyday areas where the condition shows up. He discusses chess, where blindfold play depends on visualizing the board, and piano, where players may memorize scores. He recalls struggling to draw a frog for a school newspaper and finding it hard to describe faces, though he recognizes faces and voices well. He credits pattern recognition and organization as strengths, linking them to reading tissue slides and teaching through analogies, and he asks whether the condition is genetic or more common among pathologists.

The closing part turns to hacking and AI. He proposes that hacking is clever use of technology and recalls writing a backgammon program on a 16K machine during medical school. He suggests that intelligence, imagination and organization may be shared traits among hackers, and he tests chatbots on questions about fictional characters, finding their answers inconsistent. He ends by proposing questionnaires and studies that could explore aphantasia among technical people.