No mental image

I have a friend who designs cards for friends every Christmas. She carves the pattern into lino, maybe a robin, or a heart shaped a bit like a beetroot. I often feel like a lino tile someone has hollowed – not in a violent way but not unmarked either. It’s how time manifests in all of us. Like a gouging but with an aesthetic, unique to us.

I first heard of aphantasia in a writing workshop – a poet told us she didn’t see visual images in her head. I had always thought everyone didn’t. Research says only 1-4% of people have aphantasia, which they describe as another way of apprehending the world.

Researchers are quick to pity the aphantastic, noting how participants in a study expressed shock on discovering that other people can conjure up an image in their mind’s eye. They frame aphantasia as an absence, I think of it as a gift.

It’s no surprise that three of the poets in the room had aphantasia. There is more than one way to “see” the world. When I call to mind a sandy beach, it’s not a picture, but a network of cues. Because after all, nothing is static. And if you think of an apple, it might be green, but the apple another person thinks of could be red. What if every possible apple was in my mind’s “eye” at once?

Other issues are associated with aphantasia: people who can’t visualise an image in their mind’s eye are less likely to remember the details of important past personal events or to recognise faces.

When my husband reads, it is as if he is watching a film in his head. His reading is painfully slow, I imagine the mental clutter accumulating scene by scene. When I read, it is clean. I am stringing something together – I can describe the characters, I can predict their actions, but I read fast and what I imagine is not visual. My memories are similar – when my children are not there, I can’t call their faces to mind, but their faces have been in motion all their lives, I can’t believe there is one image that would stand for them.

I have always had a shuddering dislike of photographs, particularly since my father’s death. Who wants to stare at a stuck face? Like a stuck clock – I think aphantasia may give you a different relationship to time.

It is true that I am less likely to remember important past events. I couldn’t tell you in what year I got married. But the sensation of the room erupting into dance will stay with me, without the sweaty photos. And I have watched that video of my dad whirling around the room any number of times.

I can’t recall my dad’s face and I’m grateful for that, he is in my past. I imagine the researchers would find me a cold fish, but they come with bias. To me, this is a world focused on presence. But I can have my father entirely in his absence. I’d say that was pretty much exactly what love is, the ability to be with someone when they aren’t there – to know someone so well their presence isn’t material to the knowing.

This morning we were looking at a seagull. My husband pointed out that for a bird to tuck its wings in when it isn’t flying, is an extraordinary feat of engineering. I thought about the skeletons of wings I have seen, the narrow fan of bones. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine it – think of the origami of overlapping ligaments, or an aeroplane trying to nestle its huge wings in.

I learned how to open a fan one-handed in Spain in my teens – it makes a satisfying sound, like an abacus, the sound of sequencing. How can a bird spread its wings noiselessly in and out? It seems like a miracle akin to flight.

Surmaya Talyarkhan (@surmayatalyarkhan) completed an MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway in 2025. She lives in London and has published poems in Dreich and Wee Dreich magazines, Between the Lines anthology and Sphere, a Royal Holloway zine.