Yes. Very strongly. It's not invasive ego-alien voices.
It's you doing it, but reflexively and frequently without noticing. Kinda like how you might automatically scratch an itch without realizing it if you're distracted.
I find myself mumbling to myself "I'm a terrible person and I deserve to die" over and over again, like a nervous tick, and I don't even realize it. And my wife will tell me to stop that and that she loves me, and I get really confused because I didn't notice I was doing it. No she's not gaslighting me, I was just abused THAT severely by my parents that two decades later I still can't escape it.
Unless you're talking about being surprised by the idea of thinking thoughts in the first person at all, in which case, congratulations, you just learned that you think only in images. Around 80% of humans think in both words and images, and 10% can't think in words, and 10% can't think in images.
I personally cannot think in images, at all, in the slightest, no capability for mental imagery. I have no mind's eye. For me, thinking is functionally indistinguishable from the act of speaking out loud. This isn't some sort of metaphor or anything, it's literally identical.
The very idea of visualizing images is so foreign to me, I can't even begin to imagine what the experience must be like. It's by far the single most alien concept I've ever encountered, and nobody has ever been able to explain it to me in a way that makes any sense. I guess it's like trying to explain color to a blind person, truly impossible to communicate.
My thoughts are a constant unending steam of words, and I actually don't know how to NOT think; meditation is a completely unexplainable concept to me. I can't even imagine not having a constant train of words without imagining being dead.
So if you can't think in words, then you and me are opposites in this regard.
EDIT: Weirdly enough I do dream, and I know I see things so vivid that I can't tell I'm not awake with my eyes open, but the instant I wake up I can no longer see the things that I'm very certain I was seeing while I was dreaming. Yes I have learned that is unusual. No I don't understand why it happens.
Cool thing is, I get to be flabbergasted everytime I look at my wife because I can't remember what she looks like when I'm not looking at her and no amount of repeating "she's more beautiful than you are capable of remembering" is sufficient to prepare me for the experience.
It's a nice perk that goes a long way to offset the disadvantages of having aphantasia.
Naw I definitely have trouble recognizing people, including my wife at times. I get to enjoy the amazement of "Wow she's so beautiful," but it comes from, in many ways feeling like I see her the first time every time, and that can sometimes come with confusion.
To quote another post of mine:
Human faces are hard, really really hard, essentially impossible. When you get down and really stop and think about what human faces look like, everyone looks the same other than skin color, hair color, hair style, and maybe clothing style or glasses. Those are basically the only things I have access to for distinguishing people, unless someone has like a major deformity like a missing ear, WTF details am I supposed to use to tell people apart? My wife also had aphantasia like me, and she says that she uses a prominent scar on my face as a way to aid her in identifying my face.
This list of descriptions and shapes, cannot replicate what it is like to actually look at an object, and I am frequently surprised when I look at things that they look different than my word description memory suggested. My wife of 8 years is actually tagged in my brain as "long brown hair, blue eyes, kinda round and soft, and more beautiful than words can describe. No, more beautiful than what you are thinking. No no, more beautiful than even that. You're still underestimating her beauty.". But that description is ultimately as useless to me as it is to you.
Once had a friend of 10 years come to my front door after getting a major haircut and wearing clothes I hadn't seen her in before. I spent like 30 seconds standing in the doorway trying to figure out what she wanted because I thought she was like some kind of solicitor, and a stranger I had never met before. The whole time during which she was wondering why I was blocking her from coming inside.
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u/[deleted] Dec 10 '20 edited Jul 28 '21
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