Reading With Aphantasia started from a simple question: what does it actually mean to read without a mind’s eye?
I’m Helena. I have aphantasia, the cognitive experience in which the brain doesn’t form voluntary mental images, and I’ve been a reader my whole life. When I first learned there was a name for the way I process books, I wanted to understand it properly. That curiosity became this site.
My background is in law, but my interests have always pulled toward understanding how the mind shapes the way we move through the world. Years spent travelling and meeting people from vastly different walks of life have deepened that curiosity considerably, and so has running this site. It took a back seat for a while due to health reasons, but Reading with Aphantasia is back, and with a clearer direction than before.
This is a space for people who engage with stories differently. Here you’ll find writing on aphantasia research, reading as an aphant, and the broader role literature plays in human experience, including for people in circumstances where imagination might be the only freedom available. I’m also building a community book finder, a database where readers can rate and discover books based on criteria that actually matter to aphantasic readers: how visual the language is, whether it’s character or plot driven, and how description-heavy the prose is.
Readers of all kinds welcome.