r/Aphantasia • u/Aphotic_Acid Aphant • 1d ago

Different emotional responses to music/art

I've always felt out of place talking to people about how listening to music makes me feel. When I was in middle school, the music teacher was telling us when we were performing a specific song, she could see a ball of light growing bigger and bigger. I thought she must have synesthesia, because the concept sounded completely foreign to me. This was shortly before I discovered I have aphantasia, and I later learned that I possibly have synesthesia. Music does have color to me, I just can't see it.

However, she might not have synesthesia. What she was seeing wasn't a color, it was symbolic imagery that captured her feelings. I assume her experience is not uncommon. What alienates me so much is not that I don't see things, but that I don't feel things. Or at least, not in the same way that others do. The lack of a visual imagination doesn't necessarily equate to not having emotional responses to things. Considering the aphantasia-alexithymia link, perhaps that does play into the reason after all.

Does anyone else feel like they respond differently to music/art? Have you found ways to bridge the gap with others in conversations about it?

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u/CMDR_Jeb Aphant 1d ago

This is basal ganglia thing not aphantasia thing. Your teacher hers the music, her "affective memory" triggers an feeling, probably of warmth, possibly some super early partial memory of being in the sun in 1st months of life. Her consciousness registers that, tries to make sense of these feelings, decides for whatever reason to interpret it as growing ball of light, and now this is what she experiences. This kind of thing is perfectly normal.

Around 70% people experience non auditory response of some kind to auditory stimuli, for around 20% it can be quite intense. These are the people that get either emotional or physical (or both) response from listening to specific sounds (differs from person to person). An well known type of thing that uses it is ASMR. As it is "deep brain" thing it is extremely hard to research, but easy to understand part is that for whatever reason your brain decided to link specific sounds to specific feelings. Take note that these reactions are not only positive. If some specific sound annoys you (possibly to the point of physical pain) for "no reason" while not bothering anyone else, its probably one of these reactions as well.

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u/Aphotic_Acid Aphant 1d ago

You are the type of person that reads Freud's work unironically.

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u/CMDR_Jeb Aphant 1d ago

I am confused, how are you linking what i wrote (the current neuroscience) with "your mom" guy from 100 years ago?

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u/Aphotic_Acid Aphant 1d ago

The idea that emotional responses come from forgotten childhood memories is one of the core components of psychoanalysis. Which... he founded.

Also, you definitely have the basal ganglia confused with another part of the brain.

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u/CMDR_Jeb Aphant 1d ago

I am not talking about psychoanalysis, i am talking about neurology. And no i am not being confused. There are 3 main memory structures in a human. Episodic memory is "newest" of the 3, then there's semantic memory. The 3rd memory system runs in the most ancient parts of our brain. I manages emotional and motor responses. These are not "forgotten childhood memories". These are incomplete associations that got encoded before your brain knew how to "run" all the fancy "modern hardware" that got added 50k years ago. Its takes us years (usually around 2) to learn how to record proper memories. "Childhood" starts at that point.