[Forricide]

> I wouldn’t be surprised if 99% of the discourse here is just miscommunication on what “picturing something in your head” means and 99% of people who think they are different are not.

Yeah, this is exactly the issue, and it's really just impossible to know. There's this popular 'apple test' image that gets posted a lot, where you're supposed to self-diagnose your level of aphantasia/visual imagery prowess based on which 'tier' of apple you can visualize, and people will always say: yeah, I can see [extremely vivid, realistic image of an apple] in my mind perfectly well. And that seems impossible to me, but then, how are we supposed to know what other people can actually see in their mind? It's in their mind, after all.

The one thing for me that does make me believe there is some major difference is murder mysteries; I have friends who can visualize scenes and solve mysteries that would be impossible for me.

[dumbo-octopus]

One interesting thing to consider is the "draw a bicycle" test. When presented to a population of phantastics, many will produce severely flawed bikes that could never exist in real life, yet they will claim that it matches the "image" they have in their head of one. However in my own experience despite being aphantasic I can very easily draw a physically accurate bike, not by rendering to paper the "picture" in my head, but rather by working from first principles about how the components of a bike have to interact.

[the_af]

Interesting!

Many years ago, I drew the opposite conclusion: that people that cannot draw also cannot picture the image of what they want to draw. My informal quiz confirmed my suspicions, but it has one serious flaw that completely undermines it:

I am a decent (if untrained) artist. I can say I draw well. I can also picture things in my mind very vividly.

However, I cannot draw horses. I can see them in my mind clearly -- as I type this, a realistic brown horse popped in my mind -- but if I try to draw it, it will look like a badly drawn dog. Drawing horses requires a theoretical understanding of their anatomy, it would seem.

I still think most people who cannot draw also cannot imagine the subject. With exceptions.

[mdswanson]

There are objective tests for visualization that show that aphantasia isn't just a miscommunication about internal processes. You can learn more here: https://aphantasia.com/guide/