Aphantasia, Memory, And Anxiety
While sitting outside on the front landing of my mother-in-law cottage reading Your Mind Is a Time Machine, my mind kept coming back to that study about aphantasia and memory deficiencies, and the implications for the inability not just to retrospectively visualize the past but also to prospectively visualize the future—and I started to wonder about potential links between a deficiency in prospective visualization and anxiety.
My posit is this: the ability to prospectively visualize the future enables one in essence to simulate potential experiences and therefore inherently prepare your mind for the possibilities. If one lacks the ability to prospectively visualize, then, your mind cannot truly prepare for the possibilities—or even, perhaps to some degree, distinguish or estimate comparative likelihoods.
It’s almost a bit counter-intuitive, in that you’d superficially think that simulating potential experiences would therefore, in a kind of reverse sense memory, make you experience a version of them; if the possibility being simulated is bad for you, wouldn’t that give you anxiety about it rather than relieve it?
My layman’s flight of fancy here is that this superficial instinct is wrong, and that simulation decreases anxiety by letting you “safely” experience a potential version of events, and that being unable to engage in such simulations leaves a mind more at sea and unprepared.
My mind, for instance, would be perfectly capable of conceiving of possibilities but incapable of making any judgements about them due to this inability to prospectively visualize, or simulate, them. An extreme version of this occurs when under significant cognitive load: I’ve called it the uncollapsed autistic wave function.
A closing sidenote: this has me thinking about the effects the mirtazapine has on my anxiety, which is that it doesn’t eliminate my experience of anxiety—it’s not somehow allowing me to prospectively visualize the future and make judgements so much as it’s taking some of the edge off in an almost dissociative way, letting me set it off to the side.
Do people who are not aphantasic, or who do not have retrospective and prospective visualization deficiencies, experience anxiety—or for that matter its treatments—differently?