What Makes a Story, Part 1: Aphantasia

This is the first part in a three(ish) part series about narrative—while I would love to write one long piece with all of the ideas, the outline became too sprawling to write in one week. I make no claims of expertise, these are just the thought of one mathematician with a heart for the liberal arts. Part one discusses my own relationship to storytelling and contains mild spoilers for Everything Everywhere All At Once.

When I was 13 my grandfather and I went to Australia. Our group spent a few days on K’gari (also known as Fraser Island)—our guide was an aboriginal man whose family had lived on the island for generations. All of the electricity on K’gari Island turns off at shortly after sunset, so light pollution is virtually nonexistent at night. On the last night we spent on K’gari, we sat around a fire and he told us stories from their mythology: their creation narrative, the stories of past heroes, and the history and myths surrounding the didgeridoo. Unsurprisingly, there were stories about the figures they found in the constellations. On K’gari, however, there are portions of the sky that are so dense with stars that the locals would create constellations out of the negative space in the sky. I remember being fascinated by the stories. At one point I stepped away from the fire and laid on the ground to get a better look at the stars. I can’t claim that I was somehow sucked into the narrative and saw the heroes dancing among the stars. There was no “fantastical imagery” conjured in my mind; all I saw were the stars, but I know that I experienced something special that night. I already had a soft spot for the art of storytelling, but listening to those stories passed down through generations convinced me that there is something a little bit magical about storytelling.

The Human Experience

I’m not going to pretend that I have some sort of “extra-special knowledge” when it comes to the history of storytelling, but I do know this: storytelling is central to the human experience. I can’t cite a study but I know deep in my bones—the same way I know how to raise my arm or know what an apple looks like—that humans have always been telling stories. Storytelling, of course, serves an evolutionary purpose. Stories can be used to spread life-saving information through a population group. To reduce storytelling to an evolutionary mechanism, however, is like reducing man to a featherless biped. When someone tells you a story, they invite you to share an experience. The beauty of storytelling is evident; it’s something that humans have done for millennia: gather around the campfire and weave epic tales of good and evil—or sometimes just the epic tale of what they did that day.

It’s partially this communal aspect that draws me to narrative. One summer in high school I found myself in a movie theater watching an animated movie that was entirely in Spanish. One of my friends has cracked her phone screen so a group of us spent the afternoon at the mall while it was getting repaired. We window shopped for a while but we still had two hours to kill by the time we exhausted the offerings. When we wandered over to the attached movie theater we say they were playing Un Gallo con Mucho Huevos in ten minutes and immediately bought tickets. Thankfully there were English subtitle but, as far as I could tell, we were the only people in the packed theater that didn’t speak Spanish.

The next 98 minutes felt a bit like a fever dream. Occasionally, the subtitles would give away a joke a few seconds before it would be spoken on screen. This meant that my friends and I would laugh a few seconds earlier that the rest of the theater. I don’t remember any of the plot (aside from a satirical character named “Snoop Duck”) but I do remember how it felt to be in that theater. I was with people that I loved watching a movie on a random Saturday afternoon. Sure, some of the jokes didn’t translate into the subtitles and we sat there silently while the theater erupted in laughter around us. It didn’t matter that sometimes the jokes would hit differently and would we would laugh at the wrong time. When we laughed, it was a thing we did together—sometimes just the three of us but, when we were lucky, it was the entire theater. The plot of the movie, it turns out, was insignificant in light of the experience of the story.

A Historical Perspective

In the beginning of undergrad I spent so much time waxing poetic about the importance of narrative that in my second year I decided to write a paper about it. Titled “Dress Like It’s Fall and It Will Become Fall,” it explored the ways in which a society is shaped by its cultural mythos. I won’t get into the details of the full argument, but the central idea was that the stories we tell ourselves shape the way we see the world. While it may be blatant propaganda, Virgil’s Aeneid tells us what it meant to be a “good Roman” in the early Roman Empire. Its particular picture of piety tied together filial, religious, and patriotic devotion. The epic’s hero, Aeneas (who founds modern Rome in the final chapter) has many not-so-subtle parallels to the then-newly-crowned Augustus; Virgil seems to be telling us, “You know how we all revere Aeneas for his piety? We should do the same thing with Augustus. After all, just like Aeneas was the last hope for Troy after the city’s fall Augustus has saved us from the turmoil of the past decades.” For generations after its composure, Romans looked to The Aeneid for guidance—over two thousand year later we still read it to gain insight into the Roman mind.

The Aeneid is not a one-off example! In fact, it isn’t even confined to epic poetry. I won’t go so far as to say that every narrative has some “deeper meaning” that it is trying convey,¹ but for the vast majority of stories, it’s safe to assume they have something to teach you. Whether or not the things they have to say are worth listening to, however, is another question entirely. This link between thematic ideas and narrative is why I’m such a big proponent of the Liberal Arts. When done right, it exposes us to some of the best pieces of literature and teaches us to engage critically with the world around us.

After my sophomore year, I solidified many of my thoughts surrounding storytelling. I knew that my thoughts on storytelling would likely never stop evolving but at least I had formalized my opinion on the place of a cultural mythos in society.

Compulsive Storytelling

With my grandiose views what stories “mean,” its no surprise that I love telling them. I’m not sure if I’m any good at it,² but I definitely have lots of practice. Storytelling is so woven into my being that I realized I tell stories compulsively while telling a story.

Some coworkers and I were grabbing a coffee and pastries between setups during Family Weekend at Biola. I started telling a story (sadly I can’t remember what it was) and one of the trainees stopped me.

“Wait,” he said. “Does this have anything to do with what we were talking before or are you changing the subject?” I was a little embarrassed—I knew my story’s relevance was tangential at best but it stung to have that pointed out before it was halfway finished.

Thankfully, another coworker jumped to my rescue. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Lucas has this super power where he starts a story that seems completely random but he somehow always connects it back.”

While what he said was kind, it set the bar of relevance a little too high for what my story could deliver. Thankfully, he had given me another way out. “I have this weird thing with storytelling,” I said. “When I think of a story that is related to topic of conversation it bounces around my head until I let it out by telling the story.” This seemed to satiate my coworkers and we went back to discussing the next room setup: what gear we needed to pick up, how fast the turn around was, etc. In the back of my mind, however, I was turning over what I had just said.

You see, I spent years justifying to myself why I didn’t have OCD; I had all sorts of rationalizations for why my experience was distinct. When I read Turtles All the Way Down, a book which is, in part, about the author’s experience of OCD, I told a friend “I’ve never seen my own experience of mental illness so thoroughly explored… but that’s weird because I don’t have OCD.” During an intake exam at a new therapist a few months later, I told the examiner “I have obsessive thought patterns, but not in an OCD way because there aren’t any compulsions that go along with them.”

After years of rationalization, there I was: seated outside a coffee shop with my coworkers having described an obsessive thought pattern and a corresponding compulsion.

This realization put my love of storytelling in context. It’s not just that I love storytelling in the abstract and liked to take on the mantle of storyteller from time to time—I have no choice but to be a storyteller. When I think of a story I obsess over it, turning over the details in my mind in the hopes to arrive at some “local maximum” of quality. Because of my OCD, this process will continue until I tell the story to the group. As far as my compulsions go, this is relatively harmless. With some therapy, I’m able keep the stories in my head when the situation isn’t appropriate. But at the end of the day, I like telling stories. I like what stories mean; how they bring people together and draw them into community.

It turns out, however, that even this context was incomplete. For the final piece of the puzzle we need to change the subject—but I promise that it will relate.

The Apple

I want you to look at the nearest flat surface and imagine an apple. Not some platonic ideal of an apple, but pretend there is a real apple sitting there. What color is it? Does it have a bruise? Is there a perfect little leaf on the stem? Now that you’ve got the picture in your mind, how would you rate your ability to “see” the apple an a scale of 1-10 where 10 is “I know its made up, but I can practically see it” and a 1 being “what are you even talking about, of course I can’t see anything”?³

Most of the people I ask give an answer above 6 or 7; on a good day I’m a 1. The concept of a “mind’s eye” is totally foreign to me—until recently I thought it was just a useful metaphor. I have a condition known as aphantasia, which is sometimes colloquially known as mind blindness. Put simply, there are no pictures in my head. According to a recent study in the journal of Consciousness and Cognition,⁴ less than 1% of the population have full aphantasia and about 4% have dim/vague mental imagery (if any at all).

There are some reports of so-called acquired aphantasia (usually the result of some sort of traumatic brain injury) but mine is congenital—I’ve had it my whole life and never known anything else. Until November 2018 (just over a year after the coffee shop story) I had no idea that I was different. When people would say “picture a beach” I always thought was a way to say “think about the ideas of peace and serenity.” I figured it, like the piety of Aeneas, was societal shorthand for a shared concept. Imagine my surprise, then, when I learned that other people could just “see things” in their head!

Suppose I were to ask you to complete the lyrics, “Mary had a____________.” Now chances are, you were able to fill in little lamb with thinking about it. It’s not like you had to picture Mary in their shepherd’s outfit or imagine a sheet of paper with the lyrics written on it—you just knew the answer. That’s what all knowledge is for me! It’s hard to describe it any further without leaning on visual metaphor. For me, concepts float in a void of nothing, accessible as ideas, but not as pictures.

Aphantasia affects my memory. The best way I can describe it is that I remember that things happened but don’t remember them happening. I’ve known that my memory was different since I was in high school. For a long time, it made me sad that I couldn’t remember things in the same way as my peers. To a degree, it still does, but the context of aphantasia has helped me make my peace with it.

When I tell the story of a memory, however, everything changes. I still can’t “see” it but, for that brief moment, it goes from a list of things that happened to something that, in some sense, is happening. I can’t give an accurate description of what its like to tell a story if you don’t have aphantasia, so maybe this is a universal experience. When I think about a memory, it’s like reading sheet music, but when I tell that same story it’s like seeing an orchestra perform the same piece—both contain the same information, but the story is alive in a way the pure memory isn’t. Just as every conductor has their own interpretation of a piece every retelling is slightly different, shaped to the audience and context.

It’s no wonder, then, that I love telling stories. This “magic power” they have to transport us out of the present and into some third place is real—if only real for me. When I hear into other people tell stories, I don’t see the stories unfold in front of me. Instead, they suck me in and I experience them the same I experience memory. For me, stories and memories are hopelessly entwined, each begetting the other in an eternal dance. The stars above K’gari may not have “come alive” and shown me the heroes of old but that night something magical happened. Words decay into imprecision when I try to explain it—they strain, crack, and break under the tension imparted by experience. Perhaps my love of storytelling is looking to that moment and trying to recreate it. Perhaps its a consequence of my brain chemistry, a obsessive thought that needs to be freed or a memory made alive again. Each of these still feel like a featherless biped, reducing something vast and intricate into a tidy little box. The beauty of storytelling may be evident, but its nature is something elusive; a word whispered from the brambles asking us to listen and follow.

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