When people talked about “picturing” things or “hearing” a voice in their head, I nodded along. I assumed they were speaking metaphorically, the way books and movies do. I didn’t really think people experienced their own Blade Runner-style voice-overs. Authors and scriptwriters use these devices to communicate thoughts to the audience.

Or so I thought. Like most people, I assume everyone else’s mind works the same way my own does. I was shocked when a friend described his inner monologue. He hears it. It has an inflection. It speaks with emotion. He can picture people and places in detail, as if looking at a photograph in his mind. It was like discovering he was a mutant from the X-Men, crazy vision powers and all!

I suspected my brain was lazy, or that I was somehow dumb. In movies, you see characters who must visualize something to succeed. Doctor Strange has to picture a destination clearly before teleporting. Neo must visualize himself moving faster than bullets. Harry Potter has to hold the image of his Patronus. All the characters struggle, but they just concentrate. Just relax and “picture it.” The more I concentrate, try to just let go; the blanker the canvas. If I had to be Neo, the machines would win.

In the age of the Internet, it’s easy to find out that you are not alone. With more people being more open about their neurodiversity and self-diagnosing, finding others is just a matter of discovering the right Latin words with which to describe yourself. Aphantasia describes a spectrum of an inability to visualize things in one’s mind’s eye. Anediphasia describes a spectrum of the extent of one’s inner monologue. Turns out my brain’s a minimalist; while others visualize, I just see a blank canvas: great for art, terrible for Dr. Strange teleporting.

I had struggled to explain my wordless mind to my friends and to myself, but with these new concepts, I was excited to find out how strange all of you people with voices and pictures in your head are.

Turns out, I don’t have full-blown Aphantasia or Anendophasia. Those are a complete lack of words and images. I have vivid dreams. Dreams are when our cognitive functions are most disengaged. However, while conscious, I can only catch the briefest glimpse of an image or the opening moment of a song. As soon as I become aware of it, if I try to focus, it vanishes. The harder I try to pay attention, the blanker my mind becomes. It’s like having a long-forgotten name on the tip of your tongue and never quite being able to recall it.

My cognitive functions are interrupting my visualization and inner monologue. My cognition doesn’t use pictures or sounds. I think in wordless patterns, connections, forces. Ideas are classified, generalized, and organized against each other.

When I try to visualize the starship Enterprise, I cannot. It should be easy. I have seen and dreamed of those ships (there are plural) for most of my life. Yet I can only grasp the faintest impression, almost like something glimpsed in peripheral vision. As soon as I try to “look,” it disappears. I can describe the ship. It is grey. It has a saucer, struts, and nacelles. The nacelles have red spinning domes at the front and bluish jets at the back. There is a strip around the saucer, and windows if you get close enough.

My mind doesn’t contain a depiction of the USS Enterprise. It contains something closer to what researchers call amodal conceptual representations: mental models that are independent of sensory modalities. I know its shape, orientation, spatial relationship, and size. I cannot visualize walking around on it, rotating it as a picture, or painting it in a different color. I can hold the concept of a pink Enterprise. I just cannot “see” it.

I’m just not wired that way.

I think in patterns and metaphors. Thoughts are like proteins. My mind is full of loose data, floating like amino acids in a soup. My cognitive functions assemble data into clusters that latch onto one another, forming clusters that fold in on themselves until POP! A complete protein appears. The idea arrives at once. I know the whole thing without words and without pictures. It is only when I examine the idea and begin to communicate it that I start mapping it to language. I have to pull it apart again into smaller parts. Now I have broken it. Like a puzzle, I am taking it apart to see how it works, but all the while trying to remember how it goes back together. I label the parts. I try to arrange them in a linear story. It’s like getting a Lego model and seeing the whole thing at once, then trying to break it down into steps so you can explain to other people how to put the same model together in their minds.

As Björk said, “words are useless, especially sentences.”

What excites me most is the external confirmation that brains are far more varied than we tend to acknowledge. As more people become familiar with neurodiversity, more people recognize their own differences. While some bemoan an increase in diagnoses, I celebrate it. This is not evidence of an increase in “problems,” but of increased education and awareness. Just as I am beginning to understand how others think differently from me, the neurodiversity movement is giving that same aha moment to countless others.

I think this is only the beginning. Brains do many things we barely understand. The very nature of mind and consciousness still defies description, let alone explanation. This is where science, medicine, psychology, and philosophy intersect; each facing fundamental, unanswered questions. I suspect we will discover that human consciousness has let a thousand flowers bloom. Social pressures emphasize common experiences and shared language, because much of consciousness exists to connect us. Fish are built to swim, and many share similar shapes and behaviors. But beyond the average fish lies astonishing diversity: octopuses, lobsters, whales—entirely different strategies for living in the same ocean. How much diversity lies hidden in the vast waters of human consciousness?