Metacognition

InterSubjectively  episode 3  Apantasia   

I attended a conference in 2000 about Brain Research and it changed the way I think about thinking. Whenever we are thinking about thinking that is what metacognition is all about. That conference was when I first heard Oliver Sacks' and Micheal Merzenich's ideas which ignited a fire within me to know more.

It was at this conference I first hear the term “blind imager” and realized I was one while sitting in the audience.  This was early in the discussions about blind imaging, and the term “aphantasia” hadn’t even been coined yet. It was at this same conference I learned about savants who can demonstrate tasks of “giftedness” and some of the limitations they face.  Savants can recreate something that exists in the world in minute detail but are unable to add any creative elements of their own.  As medical imaging technology of the human brain has evolved so has our understanding of which areas of the brain “light up” during certain activities. Even so, there is still so much to be discovered.

In 2015 I was researching the gradations of blind imaging through personal interviews and discovered “blind listeners.”   There is now an official term for that, anauralia.  Anauralia is the inability to voluntarily create mental sounds, music, or voices within the mind, meaning the "mind's ear" is completely silent. I still need to conduct more interviews and collate my results, but if you have comments on these topics I would enjoy reading them below.