![when i close my eyes i see faces when i close my eyes i see faces](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/6f/5c/94/6f5c9450ab08b0ea8c86a83d65873b40--psychic-development-spiritual-awakening.jpg)
Pareidolia, as this experience is known, is by no means a recent phenomenon. Indeed, his explanation may mean that you never trust your eyes again. We are primed to see faces in every corner of the visual world.” Lee has shown that rather than being a result of divine intervention, these experiences reflect the powerful influence of our imagination over our perception. Except I think it’d be so brilliant that I wouldn’t want to give it back.“If someone reports seeing Jesus in a piece of toast, you’d think they must be nuts,” says Kang Lee, at the University of Toronto, Canada. If you offered me a day with a visual imagination, I’d swap. I think it’d be cool – and beneficial – to imagine things so vividly. I’d love to experience life with a mind’s eye. I asked her what it looks like when she closes her eyes, and she said she sees things like a video playing in her head. I sometimes wonder if my daughter has aphantasia, but nothing she has said or done so far makes me think so. On the flip side, I suspect it’s helpful in cases where worry may be overwhelming, in that I don’t ever spiral into crippling fear and imagine a situation over and over, as some people do. I’m really envious of people who can picture themselves on a desert island to relieve stress. I’d love to take myself back to certain memories, such as when I’ve had an amazing holiday or when I first held my daughter. Although, I never really understood the whole “counting sheep” thing as a child: I couldn’t see any sheep so I assumed it was just a synonym for counting. Strangely, I am a lucid dreamer, so it seems only my voluntary visual imagination is affected.
WHEN I CLOSE MY EYES I SEE FACES SERIES
The Lord Of The Rings and A Game Of Thrones are extremely descriptive series that I would love to enjoy, but quickly become bored with. I still enjoy reading – sci-fi and fantasy – but detailed literature is a slog.
![when i close my eyes i see faces when i close my eyes i see faces](https://buzzworthy.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/keith-larsen-faces-in-things-5-700x469.jpg)
But I could tell you how she looks, where she has a freckle, what her hair is like, from repetitive memory. In that sense, it’s a little sad because I cannot picture my five-year-old daughter when I’m not with her. I’m dreadful with directions because I can’t remember landmarks. If you have a visual imagination you can look at a diagram and it triggers your memory but I learn by repetition or physically doing something. When I came to do it in the lab, I understood it immediately. For example, we had to learn a cell-counting technique but, regardless of how many times I read it, it didn’t make sense. Lacking a visual element to my imagination meant that tests of memory recall were difficult. I am currently studying for a PhD in reproductive biology in Manchester, and I have found others in the sciences like me. It doesn’t mean you cannot be creative you just have to adapt. I can copy things almost like for like if they are in front of me, but if I were to draw from my imagination it would look terrible. It has been associated with similar conditions such as face blindness or tone deafness, though it does not affect cognitive or physical function.Ī good little test for me is drawing. For this reason, it is difficult to know how many people have aphantasia, but academics have developed a test using visualisation questions. I suppose you could say my imagination is broken, but each of us can only experience our own thoughts, so it is hard to compare. “No, no,” she said, “you have a wonderful imagination.” For her, things are exceptionally vivid but I think my father is like me (although people have differing degrees: some people see fuzzy images, some see none at all). I was intrigued to know if it is inherited, so I asked my parents. If someone asked me to close my eyes and picture myself by the sea, I would see nothing. I could never visualise a crown, a unicycle or an ice-cream in my hand. For me, imagination had always been conceptual.
![when i close my eyes i see faces when i close my eyes i see faces](https://i.natgeofe.com/n/9e03dc4c-3d08-439c-a2b2-ec6776f13e81/02-superb-owls-nationalgeographic_2564243_16x9.jpg)
I began to look it up online and in science journals. I’d never known any different but it was clear I had aphantasia, too, and a lot of things started to make more sense. I was 23, and it blew my mind to learn that others could visualise things. I thought everyone’s minds worked this way until about two years ago, when I stumbled across a blog post about aphantasia a condition where you lack a functioning mind’s eye. I couldn’t understand what she meant because, in my mind, they had never been images at all, just concepts. I remember watching the first Harry Potter film and my friend, who was a huge fan, was complaining that the characters weren’t how she imagined them to be. I was seven when, in hindsight, I first questioned my imagination.