[jyoung789]

>cue the other commenters telling me my experience isn’t real, or I’m misunderstanding how other people can recall stuff like getting married and or the birth of their kids when I can’t

I am much more on the hyperphantasia side of mental imagery but I am constantly astounded at how poorly visual imagery is conveyed as well as the difficulty in conveying the experience of mental imagery intuitively. Similarly it amazes me when people with mental imagery simply cant conceive that there are people without it.

Looking at a test such as this one (https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq), the best descriptor for the most vivid mental imagery is:

>Perfectly clear and as vivid as normal vision

I have always felt that comparing mental imagery to normal vision kind of misses the mark. For the common question people ask, where they say "imagine an apple sitting on the table of front of you" or something similar, where aphantasics simply can't conceptualize what that means, I have seen people say something similar to "Its like photo shopping an apple on top of what your eyes are seeing".

This, to me, sounds more like hallucination rather than mental imagery and I think completely misses the mark for explaining what mental imagery is like to people who don't experience it. For me at least, mental imagery is much more like having some space inside my head disconnected from the physical reality in front of me. So when someone says to 'picture an apple on the desk in front of you', what I experience is that a perfect replica to my surroundings is created in this non-physical space and in that space, there is an apple on my desk. Bare in mind, this is completely detached from what I am literally seeing with my eyes. I could picture an apple on my desk rolling off and onto the ground, and follow that path with my eyes in the physical space in front of me. Really though, I am imagining how this scenario plays out in the non-physical space in my mind, and mapping the motion data of the apple back into reality and using my eyes to see where it 'would be'.

I think what really becomes difficult in conveying mental imagery to people with aphantasia is that they completely lack the conceptualization that you can have all the qualia of a physical space represented to you without it being actually connected to your literal experiences of your surroundings and the space they take up. Like explaining color to the blind, or how some colors are warm and others are cold to a blind person, language fails to adequately transcend the difference in mental facilities. It seems much easier however to go imagine the experience of the blind as a sited person, much like a 3 dimensional creature could imagine the experience of a 2 dimensional one but not a 4 dimensional one.

[layla5alive]

Huh, so interesting. My imagination doesn't work like this. I don't need to see the apple. I can imagine where it would be, how big it would be, how it would act if I touched it (I can imagine it rolling, but without actualizing the visualization fully, etc.). But there's more like a semantic understanding that it's a mental pointer to an apple - with all the properties apples have very closely available in L1 cache. If I really try, I can pull up some mental jpegs or 3D models of apples, project them, etc., but usually that doesn't happen, I guess a 3D model doesn't get fully demand paged all the way in unless I really focus harder..? Maybe it used to and this is age?

[jyoung789]

That's interesting to me. I suppose I can think about the qualities of an apple or its location without having to render the obj and textures all in my head, but my default approach to 'imagination' is to render everything out completely in my head. Similar to how I can think without an internal monologue, but my baseline is that my thoughts tend to be constantly narrated.