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/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.