No Labels

It seems that for the typical person, seeing and naming happen together. Look at something, and the mind quietly tags it — "sign," "streetlight," "person" — sorting each thing into a category almost as fast as it appears. Once I told a friend how I see, he started telling me how it works for him: even while driving, he's constantly registering what he sees as words — the sign, the light, the median strip — each object named and confirmed as it passes. The naming isn't effortful; it just runs on its own, underneath everything.

That doesn't happen for me. When I look at something, no word comes with it. I don't think "this is a ___," I don't confirm it, I don't file it anywhere. I'm just looking, and the thing is simply there in front of me — present, but not named.

There's a second part to this, and I think it's connected. For most people, attention seems to select: the important thing rises into awareness and the rest falls away. Once, sitting in a car together, a person walked past in front of us, and we both saw them at the same moment. For my friend, what registered was that someone had moved — a person passed, and that was the point; the face, the hairstyle, the teeth, the bag they were carrying, the pattern on that bag, the clothes — none of that, he told me, actually reached him.

For me, all of it arrived at once, on the same layer, at the same level of detail. Nothing was ranked as more or less important; the whole scene came in together, evenly. If someone had asked me to remember that person, I could still have recalled how they looked weeks later.

I should be precise about what "recall" means here, because I have aphantasia — I don't see a mental picture. It isn't that a clear color image comes back to me. It's that the information is held: I understand and can describe what was there, as retained knowledge rather than a replayed image. The scene doesn't return as a picture. It returns as everything I registered about it, still intact.