[haswell]

What are you trying to imply with the “hmm”?

I personally found out about my aphantasia when reading an article in Scientific American titled “When the Mind’s Eye is Blind”. A whole lifetime of experiences clicked into place.

So it’s not surprising that there would be an outpouring of new discoveries after more people learn of the concept.

Learning about aphantasia is how I learned people experience anything other than nothing visually in their mind’s eye.

[card_zero]

Good question, I couldn't quite put it in words, but it's the popularity that bothers me. It could be popular because everybody's having great insights, but it could also be popular because everybody's greatly persuaded by a fashionable media buzz. On the internet, discussions like this always turn into a love-in where everyone reports anecdotal experiences and gets treated with esteem for being part of the community of believers. Back in the 90s I was briefly on a mailing list for people who had done the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator test so we could all report how INTP we were (that's the sensitive nonjudgmental intellectual one). It reminds me of that.

[vidarh]

It's popular because most of us had never heard about it until a few years ago, and for a lot of us a whole lifetime of experiences suddenly made sense.

I always wondered why people would talk metaphorically (because I assumed they must do, because clearly you don't see things that aren't there other than while dreaming... or so I thought) about images of people they knew fading, or forgetting what they looked like.

And then suddenly I was told it wasn't metaphorical.

And then a few years later I had my one experience of seeing vivid imagery outside of a dream.

It also keeps coming up because people get all weirded out at the thought that this is a thing, and start insisting the distinction isn't real.

But having experienced both: Imagining things without visuals and with is nothing alike.

And I knew that before the experience I mentioned too, because images while dreaming is also wildly different from how I imagine things while awake.