I learned of my own aphantasia in HN in the past (and now I learn that I also probably have this other thing, dang...). Otherwise I could sign my name under the rest of your post. I still have the doubt whether there is a real difference between people or just optimism when they describe how they imagine things. I also wonder why they don't use this visual imagination to entertain themselves.
In fact, I do have a quite concrete musical imagination, not very far from actually hearing the music I want (in fact, I have experienced episodes -especially when tired- of thinking I had actually heard it, when I was only hearing it in my mind) and I do spend considerable amounts of time playing music in my mind just for fun, both as background music for some other activity I'm doing or as a standalone activity.
On the other hand, this makes me thing they are on to something - if it's possible to play music in one's head, why not images? But I just can't with images.
> I also wonder why they don't use this visual imagination to entertain themselves.
As a kid I used to do exactly that. I can recall realizing one day that most people didn't use their imagination like a TV.
I used to have "serials" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_film ) I would watch/create as I went to sleep at night. Here's an odd detail: Every once in awhile my brain would notice that my head was sideways and get confused about how to orient the visual "presentation": vertically in line with gravity, or horizontally in line with my head and eyes, how it would be if I was sitting up or standing. When that happened it felt like trying to watch a TV turned sideways. The vast majority of nights this didn't happen.
My favorite scene in a movie is a fact, as is what happened in it. I can remember what it was, even if I can't rewatch it in my head. Do you need to replay the whole thing to know what scene you liked the most?
Books are glorious fun. My experience of them is intensely verbal, though - my wife is intensely visual and often gets frustrated with books I loved because they don't use enough visual language for her to construct an internal movie from. So we get different things out of novels.
I would fail horribly if asked to sketch my bedroom. I can regurgitate the basic layout as a series of statements but can't begin to show you what it looks like (despite several years of doing okay in art lessons). If I'm not looking at it, I cannot draw it.
That’s fascinating! It makes me happy to know that you enjoy books.
Have you ever watched any videos by 3blue1brown? I personally find I have difficulty understanding concepts until I find a way to visualize them. Which of course becomes very challenging for abstract mathematics. I wonder if you find things that are traditionally difficult to visualize easier to comprehend. Such as having greater intuition for higher dimensional math.
I think it may be easier for me to comprehend things that are hard to visualize. Higher math was a struggle for me at first, as I was not a natural reductionist, but once I had a really good calc prof, and after that it worked pretty well for me.
These days I can barely even do long division because I haven't had to use mathematical skills since I started working as a programmer, but when I was doing more advanced math, it seemed like it was less of a struggle for me than many of my classmates. That was especially true of formal proofs and linear algebra, I think.
I can enjoy good visuals in a movie, it's just that I can't "replay" them.
I think a good analogy may be food. I suppose most people don't have the ability to re-experience taste at will (I hope I'm not weird in that too)! If I ask you what is your favorite dish, you will perfectly know what it is, you will be able to describe the taste to me in a vague, conceptual way (using adjectives like "strong", "sweet", etc.) but you probably won't be able to just think about it and have its taste come to your mouth.
It's not even that the memory of the taste isn't detailed enough. It probably is, because if one day the dish is too cooked, too salty, etc. you can probably notice. So you do know how it tastes exactly, it's stored in your memory. It's just that you can't re-experience it in your mind. And of course, this doesn't mean that you can't enjoy food!
For me, the experience with movie scenes (or anything visual) is very similar to that. The Mona Lisa is stored in my memory, if you show me a copy of the real Mona Lisa and a copy with something changed (the hair, expression of her face, etc.) I can probably tell one from the other if it's not too subtle as well as anyone else, but there's just no explicit mind images involved in that, just like in the case with the food being too cooked.
As for books, I enjoy them a lot, I have always been a book lover. But I do notice that I enjoy more the story, facts, events going on, than the imagery. Those books that have more than 2-3 consecutive pages of descriptions tend to bore me, I long for more action, more events.
That's maybe the only consequence of aphantasia that I can think of in the "outer world", preference for one kinds of books over others. Because the funny thing is that, while it seems like a huge different internally, it really doesn't seem to affect skills or interactions with other people at all. In fact, the only tests of aphantasia I've seen are all subjective (they ask you about your mind images, or lack thereof). It's not like "try to solve this task, and if you can't, you have aphantasia". There don't seem to be real-world things that one can't do with aphantasia - in other conversations about this, people have mentioned the kind of puzzles with unfolded cubes where you have to know if they will be equal or not when you actually build the cube. But I can still solve them, I just don't have an image of the cubes rotating in my head with colors, drawings, etc. but I have the concept of "if I rotate the cube this way, this side will be rotated in such and such way" that allows me to solve the puzzle.
Part of me suspects this is perhaps just a minor variation in the brain’s handling/interpretation of information. There is tremendous variation in people’s ability to visualize and how concrete that visualization actually is.
Some artists can completely visualize the art they want to create before picking up a tool. I’m only like that in the vaguest sense. Most of the time my imagination imagery is fleeting and difficult to hold on to. Like seeing something out of the corner of your eye, but when you turn to look, it’s gone.
But my memory is either very visual or very sensory. I may not remember the details of some movie or other that I saw a year or two ago, but I will often still be able recall how it made me feel and whether I liked it or not.
As for food and tasting, I do recall flavors as if I am tasting them again, but to borrow a phrase... it is as though through a mirror, darkly. It’s an echo of the real thing. Less real. Not satisfying.
> If someone asked you what your favorite scene in a movie is, how would you respond?
I won't be able to respond, because I have no idea.
If you show me, like, a catalogue with screenshots of 50 different movie scenes from the movies I watched, I could tell you which of these 50 scenes I like the most right now.
> It would seem to me that fiction books would be exceptionally boring if I was not able to visualize what I was reading.
Yes, they are. I've always tried to "read more", and after reading something, I was usually confused of how a book that everyone praises so highly is extremely dull to me.
But now, after I found out about the aphantasia staff, it's clear to me that maybe 80% of the books are written for people who can visualize, by authors whose intent was to express themselves in a way that promotes visual imagery.
If you take that away, most books are useless for me. They don't have a compelling story, and their purpose is to make the process of reading enjoyable. For me, on the other hand, the process of reading is irrelevant.
When I read books, I'm looking for compelling stories and interesting concepts. For something to think about AFTER I've read the book.
My favorite book is 1984. The Lord of the Rings books are usually praised by people, but I'll
spend a better time reading news than reading The Lord of the Rings.
"The protagonist tries to challenge an authoritarian government and ends up in prison, being lectured about the politics" is a far more meaningful and relatable story,
than "The protagonist manages to destroy a certain ring, which somehow makes the evil god go away."
"So, I need to write about what happens to Sam and Frodo after they destroy the ring. Maybe they get stranded on the volcano and barely manage to survive, until a group of soldiers finds them and takes them to a safe place? Nah, it'll be too boring to imagine. Maybe the ancient aliens suddenly drop from the sky and rescue our heroes on their epic space ships made of dragons? Awesome, but it'll be too absurd. So, maybe the eagles appear, and Sam and Frodo fly on them? Perfect, it'll make this scene very enjoyable to imagine, while not being too farcical."
> If someone asked you to draw a sketch of your bedroom, could you? what would you be basing it on?
I could do it. I know my bedroom, and I'll start by drawing some basic lines and details, then I'll look at the drawing to compare it with my knowledge of the bedroom, maybe erase something, maybe add something, and repeat - until I know that I drew the best possible representation of what I know about my bedroom.
The thing with drawing is that I have to have the KNOWLEDGE about what I'm drawing in my conscious mind to be able to draw the thing.
For example, I'll recognize Obama if I look at a photo of him. But if you ask me to draw Obama, I won't be able to do it now, because I have no idea how specific features of him should look like.
I can study Obama's portrait for some time, and then I'll be able to draw a better picture of him. But still, I won't be able to draw an accurate representation of him without a reference photo of him.
In fact, I do have a quite concrete musical imagination, not very far from actually hearing the music I want (in fact, I have experienced episodes -especially when tired- of thinking I had actually heard it, when I was only hearing it in my mind) and I do spend considerable amounts of time playing music in my mind just for fun, both as background music for some other activity I'm doing or as a standalone activity.
On the other hand, this makes me thing they are on to something - if it's possible to play music in one's head, why not images? But I just can't with images.