Aphantasia - Aphantasic in the Field

 

Before we begin I'd like to lead this with a little exam. I want you to take a second and close your eyes, try to focus your senses on my voice, I want you to imagine a table with a cup on it and two chairs. Then Someone walks in and occupies one of the chairs. Are you all set? 

Now open your eyes, Good morning! I have only two questions to ask and you just have to answer with yes or no. When you imagined the cup placed on the table, could you see what color that cup was? What about the person who walked into the room and occupied the chair, could you tell who that person was? Was it someone you know for instance? 

Well, if you can see this then Congratulations! you are off the hook, quite the opposite from 2% of the world's population. Some people find it impossible to imagine that cup, the person who walked in, or even the face of someone they miss! A phenomenon named Aphantasia, people with Aphantasia can never build a mental image, their mind’s eye is blind! They can realize the concept of an object or a person but they can never actually see it with their minds in its true form. Studies and brain scans indicate that some people are unable to bring an image to mind even of familiar places or family members. 

Whilst there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that visualizing things in your mind can accelerate learning and improve education performance, but what if you have no mental imagery? And that has raised the question, if you can not imagine things, how can you learn!

My Name is Layali and I am here today to answer this question!

When it comes to learning, there is no “one size fits all” solution, and although Aphantasia does not seem to impair creativity. Many Aphantasics are successful in creative professions and have ways to compensate for their lack of a mind’s eye, but learning comes in many shapes and colors, and whichever strategy we learn by, I believe it all result in the same outcome which is fulfilling the hunger of curiosity and achieving a higher level in whichever field we tend to take. 

I came across an article once that stated “Learning is a process that occurs at all times, at all places. It should be a process of continuous learning that is directed towards not only providing the individual needs but also that of the relevant community” this purifies the entire concept of learning. Where we live in a world ruled by Academic learning systems, which I am all for, but today I'm not here to talk about Academia, I'm here to talk about the alternative learning strategies that can result in the same outcome as Academia.

I Myself, 8 years ago had been given the role of a tour guide in Fakieh Aquarium, where my job relied on introducing marine life to visitors, starting from the shores all the way to the deep oceans.

I was suddenly supposed to tell stories and lay on facts all of which happened when I was 17 years old, so young to actually impact someone else let alone teaching them about marine biology or ecosystems.

And since day one that I embarked on this journey, I have learned so much about Marine life, climate change, a massive variety of sea creatures, and a whole other parallel world I knew so little about.

But that is just the thing, it had changed me in so many ways, my knowledge has scaled up around so many topics, whether its informative side or business-wise, I became a much more active person, my research methods had been changed from relying only on books and articles to cooperative research and surveys, I was always a courage person but learning from experience somehow allowed me to take initiatives and communicate professionally, I learned to observe actions and to listen more and to double-check everything to and assure the quality of customer experience.

If I am going to list everything that I learned this presentation would take days, Instead let me tell you more about experiential learning strategy.

Simon Fraser University defines experiential learning as: “The strategic, active engagement of students in opportunities to learn through doing, and reflection on those activities, which empowers them to apply their theoretical knowledge to practical endeavors in a multitude of settings inside and outside of the classroom.” 

Experiential learning takes place everywhere in our lives, whether it's in a classroom, a science center, a museum, or even our personal experiences. It allows us to learn hands-on, to not just gain information-theoretically but to implement it as well through workshops, events, presentations, and even tours. Any method that requires taking actions and engaging students and participants with the subject is considered to be learning by experience, and the beauty of it all is that once you're done, you have achieved your purpose and learned, but along the way you gain all of those other skills, technical skills, artistic skills, social skills and much more.

In museums and science centers, they put a lot of thought on how to educate in a non-academic way, using different tools and tactics that shape a specific workshop or an engaging event. The exciting thing about museums and science centers is that you are not forced to learn, it's a judgment-free zone, where guides invite you to learn not to dominate you to learn you are invited to participate and those two things seem different are actually the same, only in schools, we are forced to learn things that we might not be interested in, and that falls under many reasons, maybe we don’t feel that it's useful in our daily life or the future, or maybe it didn't touch us in a way for us to get attached to the subject!

Let's take Climate change for example. It is not a new topic. But we didn't learn a lot about climate change. We learned about environmental issues like dying forests. We learned about the impact on the environment. We also learned about the disappearance of the ozone layer. All of that subtopics of this climate change topic. Nevertheless, this global, overarching, overwhelming swirl of climate change, it didn't show up in our school books, or at least not in a form that would engage us to act on it. 

Schools can deliver a part of the knowledge, they can deliver the basic education, the foundation to build on. And they also can build up the skills you need for the future knowledge and enhance skills we need in order to dig into piles of data and information to find answers, when you start with that it introduces you to the roads of knowledge we need today, to constantly keep learning and expanding our horizons to more than just satisfied with what we achieved but to maintain the process of never-ending learning to be up to date with this rapidly changing world

Museums and their activities are present in all these phases of lifelong learning. They offer programs for different age groups, from kindergarten groups to school classes to corporations during their diversity in education, but also to activities for seniors. They offer a rich variety of learning opportunities. In museums, they generally focus on three factors that they depend on for grasping visitors' attention; curiosity, motivation, and volition. The first two factors are clear but what is volition? It's the will to engage, the will to do something. To be able to interact either with the staff or other visitors. They study What does a museum visitor has to know or be able to do to use a museum to its full extent? They also focus on the emotional competencies, which allow feelings during a museum visit but also to maneuver through the different offers of a museum.

It's because studies like that, I am where I am today, I had never studied or even googled something related to space and astronomy until I worked in Fakieh Planetarium and I fell in love with what I had seen there. That massive universe, the infinite amount of stars! and the efforts put to develop a film, workshop or an interactive presentation made me want to become a part of this great organization who tends to work very hard to achieve the satisfaction of teaching and spreading knowledge in the most creative and simple ways. and all of a sudden, questions were blowing up my mind, questions that needed answers and just like that I had the hunger of curiosity that needed to be fulfilled.  which is a feeling that grows within your heart once you walk into a museum, a planetarium, an aquarium, or a science center, their ways of presenting content outgrows any other educational facilities because not only you get to watch and learn, but you get to feel the curiosity that drives you into their infinite learning contents, spaces, labs, and workshops.

Coming to the end of this session, I want to confess something. Remember the story I told you about Aphantasia when we started? Well, I am Aphntasic, and it hit me a few weeks back when I realized that my sisters were able to build a lifelike image in their mind and that I was the elephant in the room! Because to me the phrase of “Let me paint you a picture” or “imagine this with me”, I believed those phrases were said out of a metaphorical approach, I had no clue that other people could actually see things with their mind, 

And to me it has been difficult to study in the standard schools and universities, therefore experiential learning was not only the way to go for me but it had allowed me to go beyond my capabilities and to explore not only myself and what I am able to achieve but to also explore a mass world of varieties that I can learn and master just by experiential learning.

In a way we never stop learning, whether we were tour guides or CEOs, because learning as I mentioned earlier, is a lifelong process, and even though there is no best way to learn as it differs from one person to another, I believe the academic background is necessary to form a base of which we can use in other learning strategies, The things that we use, the places that we inhabit teach us something. Whether it is in a conference hall or a coffee shop, the learning always goes on, regardless of what shape, what method, and what path we choose to take the knowledge is out there waiting to be embraced.