[roganartu]

I don’t think this really has much to do with fidelity/clarity, so much as accuracy. One could have an extremely high fidelity visual of a bike that is incorrect and you wouldn’t say they had aphantasia as a result.

I have aphantasia, I have no voluntary visual component to my mind as far as I can tell. I also have quite a good memory. If I were to draw a bike from memory I suspect I would make similar mistakes as those.

One thing I have noticed in the threads that come up about aphantasia is comments either directly or indirectly calling into question its validity. I want to share a test I got from another HN comment, so I won’t take credit, that I have found to be the easiest way to explain to people how completely absent the visual component is for me.

Close your eyes and imagine a ball bouncing across a table. Imagine the sound it makes as it goes. Bounce. Bounce. Bounce. What colour is it?

Most people I ask answer this question without hesitation. It’s easy, because they were just looking at it, maybe still are. I have asked this question of various friends tens of times, and I still don’t know what colour the ball is for me because it doesn’t exist. I know what a bouncing ball looks like, I know the sound it makes. I know what colour it could be. But I’ve never seen it.

That is aphantasia. It’s not foggy, or blurry, or “low fidelity”, it’s just nothingness.

[harrisi]

I think I have aphantasia, and there's two interesting things about this to me.

One, I couldn't tell you what sound a ball makes when it bounces on a table. I've never thought about absence of other senses but, thinking about it a bit, I can't really think of what a glass feels like or a fire smells like either. I have descriptions for all of them, like a glass is hard or a fire smells like.. smoke? Not really the best description. But in all of these cases, I instantly know I'm touching a glass or smelling a fire when it happens.

Two, I only thought of the ball in terms of the parabola it makes. When I read the color question, I can assign a color to it, but nothing in my "imagination" changes. There's just another word, blue or whatever, associated with it.

Thanks for making me think!

[1d22a]

I also have aphantasia, and find it really interesting to hear about people thinking of things in a similar way to me! Thinking about the ball in terms of the parabola it makes it exactly what I do too. Similarly, the ball doesn't exist as a physical "ball", but rather the knowledge of the concept of a sphere (which doesn't then have size or colour). The table, not a physical table, but the concept of a plane (with no thickness, size, colour (or legs)) - just the 'concept' of the important properties.

Despite aphantasia I have always been able to conceptualise spatial relationships, but it feels much less like trying to visualise it, and much more like "understanding" the fundamental properties connecting each thing.

[tstrimple]

I have aphantasia, but it doesn't extend to imagined sounds. It's almost the opposite really. I can imagine a variety of sounds a ball might make hitting a table depending on materials involved. When I've got a song stuck in my head it tends to be quite detailed. Full instrumentals and all. That doesn't mean I have perfect recall of songs or music to any degree. And it's not exactly voluntary. I can't tell you the full lyrics to any song off the top of my head. But when I get a song stuck there, I can "play" through it all and pick out details.

[Tyr42]

So, I do not have aphantasia, but I do have an impossible time recalling tastes. Kinda like how you describe your lack of memory of glass.

I can tell apart a strawberry from a pineapple, but I can't re-experience a taste later. If I want to compare two things, I need to taste them back to back. Or I need to write down what I think to compare with next time.

But I have no problem remembering things like: how crunchy or floppy the pizza was. That's not taste.

[foobarchu]

Yeah I describe my imagination to people as kinetic. Even if I'm trying to "see" a static object, it's in a form like a sparkler drawing.

Similarly, I can't hear a particular song in my head even if it's an earworm. Instead, I hear a rough approximation of it as if I were trying to describe it to someone else (instruments as mouth sounds, bad falsetto, and so on)