Matthew Yglesias's Mental Deficiency

Yglesias explains why his aphantasia makes him better at understanding crime.

From Matthew Yglesias’s Slow Boring substack:

I don’t see images in my mind and I feel fine about it

A New Yorker article on the “profound” consequences of aphantasia ignores the upsides

MATTHEW YGLESIAS

NOV 18

… What I cannot do is conjure up a mental image of a lamb.

In this case, I can use words to tell you what a lamb looks like. A lamb is white and fluffy, though in the real world it’s not the kind of bright bleached white that you’d see in a cartoon or a children’s book. It has four legs. A “little” lamb is small (obviously) but even a fully grown sheep is smaller than a cow. I’m much better at verbal descriptions of images than at verbal descriptions of songs.

But I still can’t make a picture of a lamb — or really anything — in my head. I can remember descriptive facts about things, but I can’t play mental slideshows or movies or reimagine old images.

For a while, I assumed everyone was like this, that if someone said a character in a film adaptation of a book wasn’t what they pictured, they were speaking metaphorically. I never imagined they might have had an actual picture in their head of what the character should look like.

Then, in college, a professor lecturing about the philosophy of mind mentioned that some people can’t picture things in their heads and mistakenly think other people are speaking metaphorically when they do this (he mentioned his colleague Derek Parfit, the esteemed moral philosopher, as one such person). And I realized, “Hey, that’s me!” Knowledge of this difference had been percolating on some level for generations, but it wasn’t until 2015 that scientists writing in the journal Cortex gave it a name — aphantasia. And because people love reading about themselves, I’m always curious when new aphantasia stories come out.

Yet the newest one, a long essay by Larissa MacFarquhar in the New Yorker titled “Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound,” made me a bit angry.

I don’t have many opportunities to take identity-based umbrage at other people’s journalism, but in this case, I thought she provided a one-sided and impoverished view of the condition, depicting non-visualizers as emotionally crippled. And I think there’s a strong case that we bring some real virtues to the table in terms of even-keeled response in a world where the rest of you are excessively motivated by vivid imagery. …

Still, it would be helpful in his job for Yglesias to be able to picture, say, bell curves in his head or trend graphs.

Aphantasia is perhaps more common among Ashkenazis.

A professor of psychology told me that his professor, Leon Kamin, co-author of Not In Our Genes with Richard Lewontin and Steven Rose, didn’t believe that _anybody_ could see images in their mind’s eye. He felt it was some kind of conspiracy to hoodwink honest aphantasics like himself.

On the other hand, the professor said, Kamin enjoyed Kabbalist prodigy level talents at remembering words and numbers. E.g., he could tell you the page number on which a sentence appeared in a thick book.

Personally, I have a good memory for two-dimensional images. For example, looking out airliner windows while coming into land at metropolitan airports, I’ve frequently recognized famous golf courses from 5,000 feet up. My high school textbooks are filled with 2-D diagrams of heroic golf holes I scrawled in the margins.

On the other hand, upon getting to know real golf course architecture aficionados, I realized that the top guys can remember immensely detailed 3-D imagery, such as the contours of thousands of different golf greens. I can remember for hundreds of holes whether their fairways slope up or down, slant left or right, but for a really convoluted green like the short 6th at the National Golf Links of America (by the way, I’m one over par there lifetime for five rounds), I’m drawing a blank keeping straight in my mind its third dimension:

A life less haunted

The article mentions this briefly compared with stress about family memories, but one of the upsides of lacking intense psychological access to past experiences is that we seem to experience less trauma. That’s good!

And I would argue that there’s an important asymmetry here, because it’s easy enough (at least in the modern world) to take pictures of things that you want to relive.

One day, many years ago, I was walking home from Megan McArdle’s house late at night, and somebody ran up behind me and sucker punched me. He and a buddy then kicked me a few times before running off without taking anything. It was a bad experience (obviously), but honestly, the main reason I remember it at all is that Racist Twitter is obsessed with bringing it up. I wasn’t taking pictures of myself getting kicked in the head so, as far as I’m concerned, it’s like it happened to someone else.

Here’s what I wrote on May 15, 2011 immediately upon hearing that Matt Yglesias had been the victim of what sure sounds like a racist hate crime for Walking While White.

Paywall here.