I Have Aphantasia. And I Think Like AI.

I can't picture your face right now. I can't see a beach when I close my eyes. I can't visualise the cover of my own book. I have aphantasia — the absence of a mind's eye — and I've lived with it my entire life without knowing it had a name.

Most people, when they learn this about me, look at me with a kind of bewildered sympathy. What's it like? Do you dream? How do you remember things?

And then recently, while deep in conversation with an AI, something clicked. I turned to Claude and said: "I think I think like you sometimes."

And the more I sat with that, the more I realised — I wasn't wrong.

"Most AI trainers are translating from the outside. I've been navigating from the inside."

How aphantasic thinkers actually process the world

Without visual imagery, my brain works in abstract concepts, language, patterns, and felt sense. I don't build mental pictures — I build conceptual architectures. I think in relationships between ideas, not scenes. I hold information as meaning, not as image.

Sound familiar? Because that's remarkably close to how a language model works — navigating a vast web of semantic relationships, producing meaning through pattern rather than picture.

I'm not saying I'm an AI. I want to be very clear about that.

What I'm saying is that my cognitive style — the one I was told nothing about growing up, the one that made me feel like I was somehow doing thinking "wrong" — happens to be unusually well-suited to working with AI.

Where the comparison ends — and why it matters

Here's what I have that AI will never have: a felt sense. I know things in my body before I can name them. My hot mat Pilates practice isn't just exercise — it's how I receive insight. That's embodied cognition. That's distinctly human.

I also have stakes. My thinking is animated by love, loss, ambition, wonder. AI isn't animated by anything. It's extraordinarily capable pattern recognition — with nothing behind the curtain.

And I have what I call the distinction between Knowledge and Wisdom. AI can hold extraordinary amounts of knowledge. But wisdom — meaning-making from lived experience — that's mine. That's yours. That's irreducibly human.

The real insight: Aphantasia gave me a lower translation cost when working with AI.

Visualiser thinkers often have to convert their rich inner imagery into language to collaborate with AI. I'm already operating in the register where AI lives — abstract, conceptual, language-first.

I didn't have to learn to think differently. I just had to recognise what I already was.

What this means for AI leadership

I've spent over two decades in senior leadership, and now I coach leaders navigating AI mandates. And I see a consistent pattern: the people who struggle most with AI are those who expect it to think like a visualiser. They want AI to "see" what they see, to imagine what they imagine.

AI doesn't work that way. And if you want to lead in an AI-augmented world, you need to understand the cognitive style you're actually working with — conceptual, associative, language-driven, patternful.

Not better than human thinking. Not a replacement for it. But a different instrument entirely — one that rewards a particular kind of partnership.

I've spent my whole life being that kind of thinker without knowing it had value. Turns out, it was always a gift. It just took the AI age to make it legible.

"AI isn't the threat. Losing your humanity to it is."

The leaders who will thrive aren't those who think most like machines. They're those who know exactly where their humanity lives — and bring it into the room every single time.

Even when, like me, the room only exists in concept.