Think about your breakfast this morning. Can you imagine the pattern on your coffee mug? The sheen of the jam on your half-eaten toast?
Most of us can call up such pictures in our minds. We can visualize the past and summon images of the future. But for an estimated 4% of people, this mental imagery is weak or absent. When researchers ask them to imagine something familiar, they might have a concept of what it is, and words and associations might come to mind, but they describe their mind’s eye as dark or even blank.
... the topic received a surge of attention when, a decade ago, an influential paper coined the term aphantasia to describe the experience of people with no mental imagery.
Much of the early work sought to describe the trait and assess how it affected behaviour. But over the past five years, studies have begun to explore what’s different about the brains of people with this form of inner life. The findings have led to a flurry of discussions about how mental imagery forms, what it is good for and what it might reveal about the puzzle of consciousness: researchers tend to define mental imagery as a conscious experience, and some are now excited to study aphantasia as a way to probe imagery’s potentially unconscious forms.
The article itself went into a lot of past and current research into aphantasia and is quite detailed, worth a read if you are interested (especially if you are also quite high on the aphantasia scale like OP)
Try this archive.org link if it is paywalled
Edit: some of you all should take the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVID). The article only gave an excerpt, there seem to be a few free ones floating on the internet
I wonder if one day there will be studies on multisensory aphantasia. The article mentions sound, like the inability to get a song stuck in your head, but same is true for taste, touch, smell and emotion.
One of the bigger issues is that it impacts experiential and episodic memory, which creates continuity issues. So the person is stuck having to externalize everything in order to manually integrate it. So I disagree with the article re having the same behavior as seeing people. Maybe from the outside it looks this way, but not internally.
The article says that people with that condition tend to be in technical not artistic fields, and I don’t see much of a difference. Technical fields rely on diagrams that you draw, which isn’t any different from drawing any picture. My point is that having an eye for design isn’t related to aphantasia at all.
I find it hard to visualise pictures but I am good at imagining how things relate to each other in space and how they move. For example, if I try to imagine a scene of somebody playing on a swing hanging from the branch of a tree, if I focus hard I can ‘see’ parts of it; the rough, frayed rope, the look of joy on the kid’s face, or whatever, but only one at a time. But I can easily imagine how the swing moves, how the rider leans back or forward to make it go higher. I don’t need to ‘see’ the image for this, it’s more abstract.
Thanks for sharing. It’s fascinating how differently we all operate. I can’t do what you’re doing, even though I have high spacial visualization.