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Month: March 2021

Dreams as Internal Psychotherapy of Mind

Published on March 20, 2021

In my previous post, I talked about how mental imagery (illustrated by but certainly not limited to vision) ultimately derives from memories, modified by the pink noise that all of us have in our brains. This is why malleability of memories is so useful (unlike the pixel-perfect digital storage): it allows creativity. The same applies to dreams, but with a twist. Again, the contents of our dreams derive from memories (we wouldn’t dream an apple if we never saw one in our lives), but the modification of the images (and other sensory modalities) is more extreme. What’s going on? Ernest…

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Remembered Present and Mental Imagery

Published on March 11, 2021

Last time, we talked about writers on the aphantasia spectrum–a reduced detail of mental imagery (whether visual or audio or any other sensory modality, although I will use the visual one for examples). Interestingly, with few exceptions, the same level of detail (from almost-photographic to vague to near-nonexistent) applies not just to voluntary or involuntary imagining but also to memories and dreams. What is going on here? Could there be some commonality between these forms of mental imagery? Indeed, there is–at least, this is what current neuroscience tells us. In fact, most of our mental imagery is ultimately based on…

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Writers on the Aphantasia Spectrum

Published on March 8, 2021

After a long hiatus, I’m reviving my blog. And what a better subject than about mental states of writers? (But please pardon the current state of the website; I need to redo it soon.) A few days ago, in a closed writers’ community forum, someone brought up the topic of Writers and Aphantasia. If you haven’t heard that word before, here’s a brief rundown for you. Aphantasia is the condition when the person sees–or hears or experiences via any other sensory modality–no or little mental imagery. You know, the imagined pictures in your head, the internal voice and earworms, and…

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