I saw a BBC video explaining the importance of reading, and that a bilingual person who knew Chinese and English and suffered a stroke was unable to speak Chinese and only remembered English.
The explanation was that Chinese (and other languages that use symbols) are very visual, and therefore uses a different area of the brain than non-visual languages.
I’m a person with aphantasia, I speak three languages, and it wasn’t difficult for me to learn these languages, but I’ve never learned any visual languages, which made me curious.
Are Chinese children with aphantasia rarer than in other countries that speak non-visual languages?
I don’t have any answers, but you reminded me of Sold a Story:
A fellow mnemonist named Richard Rubin told me about it and I think it possibly connects here in a way that could have some explanatory power.
I don’t have full knowledge of how I learned to read or all the factors involved, but looking at how people seem to be struggling with simple things like the Major in ways that I did not observe when I got started, there could be a connection here worth exploring that’s larger than just reading and aphantasia.
Amazing. I believe there really is a connection between the early years of life and the development of aphantasia.
Learning to read visual languages can end up stimulating the imagination and, consequently, the brain region dedicated to this.
I don’t believe it’s the only cause, but it must be an important factor.
Note: Visual Learning is related to pattern identification, like looking at clouds and seeing familiar shapes. I believe visual languages should do the same.
Not directly related perhaps, but I have read that Western children look at pictures in a different way to Asian children.
Imagine a picture featuring a large bird flying above a field, with some trees and clouds around.
The Western child describes the bird in detail, what it is, how it’s flying, and so on. The Asian child does not describe the bird in such detail, but has much better recall of minor details in the background, the trees, grass, clouds and so on.
I assume this is a taught behavior, that the Asian child regards the picture as a whole connected image, while the Western child focuses and prioritizes the single outstanding item.
There is congenital (due to genetics) and acquired aphantasia (due to trauma).
I don’t know the ratios between the two, but [anecdotal evidence alert] in my family everyone has aphantasia (mom, dad, 2 siblings).
Given that aphantasia affects ~2-5% of the population, and that my parents had vastly different upbringing than mine (urban vs countryside). I would suggest that with my genetics there would be no amount learning Chinese in my childhood that would make me see images. It’s a genetic trait, inherited, and unavoidable.
My hypothesis (assuming that Chinese people have less aphantasia, I would like to see that number) is that Chinese people, being somewhat homogeneous genetically, are probably inheriting non-aphantasia genes.
I am very interested in this topic. Pity I don’t have the answers.
I have aphantasia and am learning Chinese - I am really intrigued by much of Chinese culture because of my research on memory systems and the relationship to art … long story.
I always struggled with any subject which required memory, but was fine with anything based on logic such as mathematics, physics and IT - the last as an adult. I am too old for computing at school. I failed every language I tried - French, German and Latin.
Using memory techniques, as a mature age adult, I went back to French and found I could manage it. So I went for the hardest thing I could imagine: Chinese.
I think that I have a lot more trouble than people who can visualise. I have constructed a whole system based on memory palaces and generating stories for the components of characters and it is working a treat for me. I have written the system up. I suspect it would work even better for someone with visualisation.
I have been interviewed by an aphantasia researcher because I use memory palaces so extensively, and it seems that I use logic and story far more than most, and never have detailed images of the locations. I am slower, probably, but it still works really well.
So I am really interested in any ideas about Chinese and aphantasia.
As someone low on the visual threshold, I’m biased.
But it seems to me that the core ancient memory techniques since at least Hugh of St. Victor are 90% logic-based if not higher. He’s got the basics of a PA system in there, if not a PAO and it’s much more combinatory than visual. Conrad Rudolph doesn’t even think Hugh’s Ark is really a Memory Palace (though I find that conclusion very strange after reading Hugh myself… the kind of conclusion a non-mnemonist can be forgiven for nonetheless.).
Ars combinatoria as seen in Jacobus Publicius and Peter of Ravenna goes deeper and then gets the full-on treatment when Bruno starts winding and weaving it together with Llull’s Memory Wheels.
In any case, my reading is that memory techniques become “visual” and exclude the previous focus on combination largely in the 20th century, possibly prompted by greater ease in inserting graphics into books. Before that, I believe in Memory Craft you yourself note the extraordinary success of Publicius – a success I imagine stems from the “visualization” of a memory wheel to show how to combine consonants to form associations, not a visualization to show how mnemonic associations are to be visualized.
This is I believe how Bruno and others like Nicolas Trigault fashioned or described memory wheels for language learning. They have punctuation marks in them and I don’t get any sense that they are meant to be visualized, but more used as volvelles by looking at them and in some cases rotating the print wheels in certain versions physically.
While I’m here and we’re talking about wheels, you might like these stone prayer wheels:
Unrelated, and not exactly Stonehenge. But still super interesting that prayers were carved into these wheels to be rotated in these stone towers.
The reminder is again not something to be visualized (or soley visualized). The interaction is engaged physically, and the wheel leaves the user with only one conclusion: spin it.
In all things, my hope remains that the fullest possible art of memory will arise and the emphases on viusalizing and “seeing pictures” (whatever that means) will become an artefact.
Imagination has no simple description and reducing it to visuals has led to uncountable losses… or gains if we focus on those who finally learn that mnemonics do not have to be limited to pictures.
I wonder if the emphasis on visualisation in memory discussions is because most of these discussions have arisen from people competing in memory competitions. For speed, to be able to create an image is much faster than creating logical connections.
For Chinese vocabulary, I create stories linking the components in the character (as do many others) and a PA system gives me the pinyin and tone. P=initial and A=final in the pinyin syllable. My people for the PA are animals, because I can get a lot more variety, but it works the same. I use a memory palace based on the radical for the first (or only) syllable of the word.
As I learn more, this stories become more efficient either because I can use combinations of components from previous characters, or because I now recognise lots of phonetic components.
Maybe Chinese kids with aphantasia do the same when they are writing out the characters over and over. For the first 60 years of my life, I didn’t know I had aphantasia, so obviously adapted. Maybe they are doing the same.
What we desperately need for this discussion is a native Chinese learner with aphantasia!
Some competitors I’ve interviewed have told me there’s no time to see pictures. And some of the records we’ve seen speak to that quite directly, or so it seems to me.
I focused quite a bit on radicals myself when I started. But when I got the Outlier Linguistics add-on for the Pleco app that changed quite a bit. It gives a lot of the stories based on the oldest known versions of the characters that helps a lot.
Sound components and meaning components can be quite stable across dozens of characters, so there’s a high likelihood that they get used in the learning process. Learning them helps with pattern recognition and you can wind up guessing how a word is likely to sound with a fair degree of accuracy (though not an astonishing degree).
In the split-test of native speakers and without and with aphantasia, I would want to see some analysis of the semantic nature of story with care taken on the sound and meaning components of characters as they tie to larger mythopoetic mnemonics in the culture.
I worry a lot about aphantasia and may write an entire book on it. Such a work would be troubled by the biases I will outline in it, but having worked in coaching situations with clients identifying as aphantasics as a large contextual part of how I “see” the situation, a major solution is quite clear.
And it has a lot to do with the larger mythopoetics that are way too big to see at a glance. Even if they could be seen, Publicius and Bruno remind us that we often only need microscopic parts in order to unfold much larger wholes.
I believe the real issue is not with how this or that person engages with the techniques, or on what basis. I think the bottleneck is in personal volition. Due to the apparent nature of things, fashioning a world stable enough to work on that in a species-wide manner is unlikely. But historical attempts to make the world such a lab do exist and carry on as we speak.
Another reason The Knowledge Gene is such an important book, and useful for guiding where exactly we place our lens and efforts at focusing it.
I really enjoyed your explanation about the use of non-visual mnemonic techniques. It truly seems that, since ancient times, there was a stronger emphasis on logical and combinatorial approaches, and that feels like a very promising alternative, especially for those who struggle with visualization.
I have a question I’d like to share with you:
In the case of aphantasia, is it caused by a genetic predisposition? Or could it arise from a lack of specific stimuli during cognitive development? Is it possible that both cases exist? In other words, is aphantasia more of a genetic condition or a behavioral one?
Based on that, I wonder: if aphantasia is genetic, then logical techniques really would be a straightforward and practical solution for those who live with it.
But if it is behavioral in origin, perhaps the cause lies in environmental factors or a lack of certain stimuli during childhood. That raises the hypothesis that learning a visually-based language in childhood, such as Chinese, could potentially serve as a kind of mental exercise to “reconnect” or develop that bridge between logic and imagination. Of course, this is just a personal hypothesis.
I mention this because, in my particular case, I feel that there is visual activity in my thinking, but I don’t have direct access to the images. It’s as if I only see the results of visual reasoning, but not the process itself. As if there were a disconnect between visualization and logic. And when I think back to my childhood, I realize I lacked many stimuli to develop imagination, which makes me wonder whether that context could have contributed to my case.
I imagine that if a study were conducted with people who learned a highly visual language in childhood, comparing the proportion of people with aphantasia to other populations, it could open up incredible paths for pedagogy and our understanding of the mind.
Shifting a bit away from the topic of aphantasia, I wanted to say I really appreciated what you said about the use of logic in mnemonic techniques. I have two questions in that area:
There is so much information out there that I sometimes get lost not knowing where to start, what order to follow, or which techniques are the most practical in everyday life. Do you have any suggestions for how to approach logical and non-visual techniques in a progressive way?
Are there any non-visual techniques that help with accessing and organizing memorized information efficiently, like an internal navigation system? (Like the memory palace) Something that allows for smooth recall even without visualizing it mentally? I would love to explore that path if there are any references here on the wiki or elsewhere that you recommend.
Thank you so much in advance. Your content has opened up many new paths and reflections for me. I’m truly grateful.
When someone is learning English they are actually learning the phonics so they move that information from short to long term memory. Dyslectics cannot do this for some reason hence the reading issue associated with this condition. Apprently I cannot even hear certain phonics.
I can however read which according to the Dyslexic Advantage is because I have moved the whole word from short to long term memory and this actual makes me a speed reader.
Some experiments would be great… and I have someone in the family who could help do research in Chinese to see what the conversation is like on the matter.
Part of the idea of the Memory Palace Bookshop is indeed to reduce the visualization requirement.
Thanks for mentioning it and hopefully all the platforms involved in memory will help get behind boosting it for the good of one and all.
Thanks for these questions. It is indeed a problem… but also not a problem.
Rather than focus on the mess of information, consider starting with your learning goal.
Then see which of the mnemonists most closely match what you’re trying to do.
Then just get started with one of them and stick with it long enough to really map out in your brain what they’re saying through study and application.
After that, add another if you like and maintain the same depth of study.
I usually suggest a minimum of 90-days per teacher due to the neuroscience studies around habit formation, myelin sheath formation, etc.
And since I’m human enough to take time to enjoy what arrogance and autohagiography tastes like, I’ve fashioned “Metivier’s Razor” which states:
“Less than 90-days of study and practice does not deserve the word ‘try’”.
I don’t believe any of the techniques are “visual” in any meaningful sense.
Rather, I think people get hooked on a shallow idea of what it means to see pictures and wind up forming a highly imaginative paradise that they lock themselves out of.
And they don’t even perceive that the very skill they’re using to lock themselves out is the skill that will set them free.
Perhaps read Kafka’s Before the Law to get a deeper sense of what I mean.
More technically, I don’t know what “smooth recall” means.
I recite many things from memory, including very long texts in Sanskrit.
But the recall is different every time. I don’t go for perfect because the memory arts are about better memory, not perfection.
Sometimes I fall flat on my face with texts that I’m 100% familiar with.
So what?
I just start again.
So I would suggest taking care around how you describe the goal. Nothing is more painful than creating an outcome that is not possible.
In any case, I think a lot is misunderstood about the relationship between using Memory Palaces to establish long-term retention and then accessing that information.
I don’t “navigate” Memory Palaces while reciting. Sometimes I might have to work my way back to something (which happened once in my TEDx Talk when people laughed unexpectedly), but it’s not necessary most of the time because the information is in long-term memory. The internal navigation system is no longer necessary.
I literally just recite the stuff without “accessing” it from the Memory Palaces. If that was required all the time, the technique would strike me as uninteresting.
The goal is to remove all interstitials to as close to zero when accessing information.
And that’s what makes the Memory Palace technique great. It itself reduces the amount of interstitials needed to establish long-term memory.
At least, that’s the art as I practice and teach it. And that’s how it works best for me, while also creating excitement, interest and absolute astonishment at how much I can recall… even if it isn’t always as “smooth” as I might like.
But “liking” things is its own topic, which is why I often refer to killing the like/dislike monster. These binary emotions just get in the way of the practice.
I prefer to karma yoga/wei wu wei, i.e. letting go of the outcome so that I just focus on studying and practicing memory. That provides a level of paradise and tranquility I strive to help everyone who wants it establish in their lives.
There are Chinese LLMs that could be consulted (Deepseek, Qwen, Baichuan, that were trained on info from China that ChatGPT may lack) I don’t think they’ll be censored about this issue at least
I asked deepseek by the way, says no evidence that Chinese have less aphantasia cases than average. (No specific studies actually)
In Chinese, aphantasia is called:
“心盲症” (xīn máng zhèng)
The term is a direct analogy to “face blindness” (脸盲症, liǎn máng zhèng), reflecting the inability to “see” mentally.
Prevalence in China vs. Global Average
As of now, no large-scale studies focus specifically on aphantasia rates in China, but here’s what we know:
Global estimates: ~1-4% of people have aphantasia (Zeman et al., 2020).
Cultural factors: Some researchers hypothesize that linguistic or educational differences might influence self-reports (e.g., languages like Mandarin rely heavily on abstract symbolism, which could affect introspection about imagery).
Limited data: Most studies are Western-centric, but anecdotal reports suggest Chinese social media (e.g., Weibo, Zhihu) has active discussions about 心盲症, indicating awareness.
Key Point: There’s no evidence that Chinese populations have significantly fewer cases—it’s likely understudied rather than less common.
Interesting Notes About China & Aphantasia
Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) perspectives might frame it differently (e.g., as a “mind-eye” disconnect), but no formal links exist.
Education: China’s emphasis on rote memorization (using verbal repetition over visual mnemonics) could make aphantasia less noticeable, but this is speculative.
I am a Chinese, born and raised from China, and spent my adult life in the west. In short, I don’t think there would be a huge difference regarding the aphantasia. but I could be wrong because of no data.
Chinese to us isn’t picture like how non-chinese describes. It is a language and we generally don’t think our language as forms of pictures if that was what you were interested to know. however, having not spoken Chinese frequently, my chinese get worse and that is true.
I met a Chinese and he said he had aphantasia. that is only one I met out of my entire life …
I thought Chinese and Japanese language and writing worked completely differently in that in English dog is always dog while in Japanese kata changes depending on what is in front or behind it.
Nope, the philosophy of logic & language, you can read books by Gottlob Frege to learn more about it. there are terms like reference and sense. Chinese is my mother tongue so some basic words like dog , we are bypassing lots of things and straight to the picture of dog rather than the word itself.
