[Ezku]

I have a hypothesis that this condition and ADHD are related. ADHD researcher Dr Russell Barkley links Vygotsky’s theories of childhood development to the mechanism by which ADHD interferes with executive function [0]. An ADHD brain would be less capable of imagining things and holding those images, which would lead to failure in development of self-directed action via those imagined images. Is this ”aphantasia”? I’m not sure, but I find it plausible.

The prevalence for ADHD has been cited at 5% in children and half of that in adults. A commenter here says aphantasia has been guessed to be at 1-3% [1], which would be a rough match. Another commenter describes their ADHD and aphantasia [2], and I am under the impression this has been reported often. If there was a causal relation I would expect to see these kinds of overlaps in the data, but it’s really the researcher’s description of a failure of imagination that makes this hypothesis especially interesting to me.

What do you think? Has anyone looked into this?

[0]: https://youtu.be/sPFmKu2S5XY

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22810934

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22811184

[spacedcowboy]

I don’t have ADHD, I’m pretty laid back actually, but I don’t have a mind’s eye.

I was 30 or so before I realised “the mind’s eye” wasn’t a metaphor, and people really could visualise things in their head. My brain doesn’t work like that, but I’m not sure whether it’s a bug or a feature...

I remember things using rules. Whenever, for example, I need to tell someone to turn right or left, the mantra “I write with my right” pings off, somewhere in my head. It just did, writing this. It’s the way I remember facts, apparently rules are much easier than random facts.

But how could that be a feature ? Well I can build fiendishly complicated mental models layering rules on top of rules. I can’t see them, but I can use them to predict results, and it gives me insights that most people don’t grasp without the explanation that I’ve just discovered for them. My brain just makes these rulesets up, examines, discards, and reformulates them without conscious effort. I get the end result, and (most times) a consequence-chain back to the problem starting conditions.

I do wonder if being forced to figure stuff out without the ability to visualise is what made me have what I consider my primary skill - the ability to look at something, conceptualise how it could work relationally, solve the problem in my head, and only then justify that solution by working back from that solution to the problem I was trying to solve in the first place.

For the people I work with, it sometimes seems like magic. For me, it’s Tuesday. I do sometimes wish I had a mind’s eye, but I think what I do have makes up for missing out, just in a different way. So as I said, bug or feature, it’s really not that clear to me - I could see the argument from both sides... :)