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Roseann Knuth's avatar

Hi Joel, first, you may like to know about an article on Aeon which references your Toolkit book quite heavily. It’s by anaesthesiologist Ronald W Dworkin, ‘When I Lost My Intuition.’ Spreading the word!

I am certainly a multi-sensory aphant and I find that understanding how differently all brains can perceive the world is really helpful when bouncing off my own experience. So thank you for teaching me. Now I have an excuse for always taking so long to choose from a menu.😁

My perpetual inner ‘voice’ is silent. So not a voice per se. But calling it a monologue sounds boring. I have read incessantly since childhood and I know I have a narrative approach to any learning. Humanities - excellent. STEM or computing - absolutely hopeless. Discrete, disparate chunks of info are really hard to memorise. Software programs, post Windows 10, are like this, as well as being so pictorial. I am pretty hopeless still at these. I can only easily learn what I understand, so it must have a narrative aspect.

I am amazed to learn that my daughter, though she has a silent monologue (and mid range imagery), can HEAR each character in a novel and they all have their own voice. 😳.

As I have aged my intuition has developed to the point that, rather accidentally, I have learned to mind/body commune re fine-tuned questions about health, appreciated by both my physio and naturopath. Your book is great. Roseann

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Brailey's avatar

I have contacted you before as a mathematician with aphantasia living in Newcastle. And find your work, and that of other researchers in the area, fascinating.

I have multisensory aphantasia unable to mentally re-experience sights, heard sounds, experienced smells or tastes or tactile sensations. However, when I read i "read silently"; that is, go through the process mentally saying the words, but without exciting either larynx or tongue.

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