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>Am I supposed to be able "vividly recollect" like some sort of imaginary first-person shooter? Apparently many people can. I mostly can't. Interestingly, I le

>Am I supposed to be able "vividly recollect" like some sort of imaginary first-person shooter? Apparently many people can. I mostly can't. Interestingly, I learned this while reading a comic where a plot point was certain memories being visualized in black-and-white versus color. The fact that the author took it as given that you could visualize memories in such detail that color could be discerned was mind blowing. I wonder how many other things we take as given based on our own mental experiences but which aren't close to universal.

ALittleLight 7y ago
I learned of my own aphantasia while watching an episode of House with my roommate. In the show they had a machine which let them view a rough picture of what a subject was thinking of. I observed to my roommate that this was an especially dumb plot point as people don't actually think in images but only in words. My roommate was quite confused and claimed that he did think in visuals and we had an interesting conversation and Google search thereafter. I still am slightly torn between thinking that there is some disconnect in explanation versus believing that some or even most people can actually visualize things in their mind. When I think of a "square", for example, I have access to all the facts I know of squares (polygon with four equal length edges) and I could draw a square or trace one in the air with my finger, so I obviously know what one looks like, but I have no visual experience of a square and it's difficult to imagine that other people do. One reason it's difficult to imagine other people have the visual imagination they think they do is because I so rarely see people just sitting and imagining things for long stretches - which I assume would be borderline irresistible if you had the kind of fantasy machine to show you whatever you wanted. Perhaps people do this in private and don't talk about it much?
- mistersys 7y ago
  When I imagine a yellow square, for example, I definitely visualize it. I can re-shape it, combine it with other shapes, rotate it, and visualize it moving. But it's not like it's replacing my vision, it's more of a secondary display that you can only see individual thoughts for a split second. If I close my eyes, I can do this better, and I actually have spent hours visualizing places I've been, or creating new ones. When I visualize my old homes and cities I've lived, it's like I have super speed and I can dash anywhere, but it's like a video with a very low frame rate, I see individual pictures and they combine with my spatial awareness to give my the feeling of moving. The frames are also very "low resolution", but it doesn't feel fuzzy but more like the frames are so quick that you can't pick out many details. In terms of words, I'm often thinking about memories I see on the "memory film", but the pictures themselves aren't words at all, my internal dialog vs. my visualization are 2 separate processes.
  - fallingfrog 7y ago
    With me if I imagine something it’s vivid enough that it blocks out my actual vision. I’ve had people stand and wave at me and I just stared at a point in space and didn’t see them because I was picturing something.
- itronitron 7y ago
  Visualization is something that lends itself to practice. I remember discussing this with one of my art teachers years ago as they said that they have a complete artist's studio in their head in which they will create things mentally before, or in addition to, creating artwork in a real studio. Their analogy on how vivid the visualization is that it is similar to hearing your thoughts versus hearing yourself say something. Whether it is worth the time to go through the effort of visualizing something depends a lot on the task at hand, the cost of making mistakes working it out for real versus working it out mentally beforehand. It's not like virtual reality but it does save me a lot of time in figuring out how to construct and put things together, or identify promising design paths.
- dan_mctree 7y ago
  It's generally referred to as day dreaming when people do step into their 'imagination devices'. Personally I do that quite a lot, especially in dead moments like on the bus. I find it to be more entertaining than using a mobile phone with terrible internet. Though, it's probably not amazing as you might imagine. For most people, visually imagining things isn't as vivid as real life, it lacks detail, and there aren't really any surprises in what you imagine. But most of all, if you're used to this 'power', it just feels mundane. Someone who can't walk might assume that walking is an amazingly pleasurable experience, but for someone who walks every day, it doesn't particularly feel very special. And indeed, the contents of what I imagine are rarely something I talk about. It feels private, and like dreams, it's hard to convey the experience to others. You might also not recognize it if I do share something about my daydreams. Suppose I said: 'I was thinking of going to the beach', then you might assume I was thinking more along the lines of your typical thought experiences, while I was actively visualizing said beach.
  - saltcured 7y ago
    I would also add that day-dreaming is often discouraged in children. So, there is social pressure to conform, beyond any in-built physiological process which might also suppress this fantasy play activity as we develop. My wakeful mind's eye is very abstract, representing space, forms, concepts, and connectivity. There is almost no sensory component to it. At best, I can form a fleeting visual which I might liken to a retinal after-image (such as glancing at a bright scene and then staring at a blank, dim wall). And, like such an after-image, I cannot change my focus to attend to a part of image. Chasing the image will erase it. However, my more abstract mental visualization lets me manipulate spatial structures, rotate them, decompose them, zoom inside them, etc. It is roughly the same for me with sounds. There is an internal experience of the spectra and dynamics which is almost identical between real listing and imagination or memory. But, there is a layer of actual ear sensation which is missing. Compared to the after-images of visual imagination, I can imagine sounds closer to the real thing. They are almost like having a TV playing quietly at night. I think my other senses are similar. I can abstractly remember or imagine touch, smell, taste, proprioception, and internal senses like arousal, hunger, pain, and nausea. But, these too are a bit abstracted and at arm's length. I used to think of myself as highly visual, but my understanding of it becomes more nuanced with age, and with hearing how other people characterize themselves. I don't really think "in pictures" but I also certainly do not think "in words". I especially do not have an internal narrative nor monologue, and have to put effort into rendering my thoughts into words. When planning or anticipating, I might imagine future scenarios including what I and others would say in conversation, and I imagine those almost the same as memories described above. I might conjur a person's mood, posture, tone of voice, and word choices. But I forecast non-verbal activities in much the same way, i.e. a hike along a windy ridge with a hawk circling above, or a dive into a swimming pool with bubbles streaming along my skin.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Suppose you need a fork, and you send me to go to your home to get one. Talk me through how to find your home and your kitchen and your silverware drawer. Can you do all that without picturing any of it?
  - Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
    Not the person you're responding to, but I also think I have a substantial degree of aphantasia (my "mind images" are quite weak and inconcrete) after reading about the subject in the past. Interesting exercise. If you ask me to explain that, I do think in a kind of abstract first-person 3D map of the street and my home, which can be pretty accurate in terms of scale, angles, etc. and it is helpful enough to accurately perform the task at hand of describing how to find the fork. But I can't really say I picture it in any meaningful way. Things have no color, but I can't say that they are black and white either, they are just the concept of an object of a given shape occupying a given space. When I mentally go to my home's door, I can stop and think about what color the door is (only with one object at a time) but this feels more like assigning the concept of whiteness to the abstract idea of the door being there, than like evoking an image of the door.
  - ALittleLight 7y ago
    I can give directions without picturing things and actually can't "picture" things at all. Although I can metaphorically "picture" things where I think about the thing and what I know of it. To direct you to forks, I'd say "stand in the kitchen facing the bar, forks are in the right most drawer." I don't need to picture anything because I've committed directions like these to memory so that I can find forks and things myself. I don't mean that I've memorized phrases like that and I'm constantly chanting them to myself, but it's more like I have a memory of that fact and can serialize my memory into those words. I couldn't tell you things that I didn't memorize - e.g. is the silverware drawer wider than other drawers? How many drawers are in my kitchen? Is there a handle on the drawer? What does it look like?
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  >I so rarely see people just sitting and imagining things for long stretches // You've heard of daydreaming though, or the mind's eye. I assume they're cross-culturally universal concepts? For my own part my teachers always told me off for daydreaming. When lying in bed as a child I would watch cartoons in my head (whilst awake, before falling asleep). I can think of a table without picturing one, choose to picture an actual table (eg the one from my childhood home, perhaps on the day my dad revarnished it), or have a sort of meta-table before my mind's eye (cf Bertrand Russell!). The image of that table from my childhood isn't just a photo, it's like a cubist table, I can simultaneously 'see' different aspects of it despite them not being contiguous - like the top surface, the feet and the underside bolts; I can also feel it like a "mind's touch", and similarly with other senses. Scents tend only to appear fully in the context of memory though, or at least they're much stronger in that context (my mother cooking gingerbread, say; or the smell of my grandparents kitchen [poorly burnt gas!]).
- marcinzm 7y ago
  >One reason it's difficult to imagine other people have the visual imagination they think they do is because I so rarely see people just sitting and imagining things for long stretches - which I assume would be borderline irresistible if you had the kind of fantasy machine to show you whatever you wanted. Perhaps people do this in private and don't talk about it much? I'm guessing we're wired by evolution to put less value on the imaginary since those prone to it wouldn't have done as well. Some people, however, are prone to spending their time in imagination and there's some research on it as a mental disorder. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maladaptive_daydreaming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maladaptive_daydreaming.
  - FPGAhacker 7y ago
    The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
- Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
  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.
  - carapace 7y ago
    > 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 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.
  - FPGAhacker 7y ago
    This is amazingly strange to me. Not about the music, but the lack of imagery. If someone asked you what your favorite scene in a movie is, how would you respond? It would seem to me that fiction books would be exceptionally boring if I was not able to visualize what I was reading. If someone asked you to draw a sketch of your bedroom, could you? what would you be basing it on?
    - 7y ago
- bostonpete 7y ago
  For me the visual replay is available if I need to go back and extract information about the scene that I didn't register or consider significant at the time. It's certainly not high enough fidelity/accuracy or continuous enough to just sit and replay memories in my head unless maybe I'm trying to get to sleep...
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  I have no visual experience of a square and it's difficult to imagine that other people do. It’s difficult to imagine that you don’t, I’m tempted to suggest that you think visual imagination must take over the eyes and appear as if in front of a person, and if it’s not that vivid it must not be visual. But that doesn’t appear to be what you’re saying. How do you imagine the Nike swoosh or the McDonald’s Golden Arches or the Mona Lisa or the Eiffel Tower or the moon or anything which doesn’t have a nice spatial reference like forks in your kitchen or a clean fact-based shape like a square? I can picture Tom and Jerry but not in any way where I could follow the lines and draw them or even answer questions like how big their eyes are compared to their noses, but it’s still visual and pictorial in some sense. A square, I can “see” it as a white outline on a black background, or like a primary coloured filled blob like MS Paint style or Mondrian painting style, and not anything about it being a right angled parallelogram those are uncertain tenuous words that might change one day or be disconnected and reconnected to another shape.
  - ALittleLight 7y ago
    Words are really the best way to describe my inner thoughts. Thinking of the Nike Swoosh - I know it as a bulging white check mark. That's about all the information I have on it available to conscious access. A visual representation of it must be stored somewhere, because I'm confident that I'd notice the difference between a genuine and obviously counterfeit Swoosh if I were confronted with it and could see it. For all the other things you mention I'd describe them as you might describe them in text. That's just how I think about them too. If I was trying to describe everything I noticed from a visit to McDonald's I might say something like "I noticed the golden arches, which seemed like an M with gentle curves at the top, perhaps twenty feet high" or something like that. Somewhat like recounting memories from a book you've read.
    - FPGAhacker 7y ago
      How would you describe an M, and why? I mentioned in another comment, it seemed to me that books of fiction would be exceptionally boring if I couldn't visualize them. Really good books, I stop seeing words as I read. I asked someone else this: what are your dreams like?
- FPGAhacker 7y ago
  What are your dreams like?
- apostacy 7y ago
  I strongly suspect that you are recalling and processing images, but that it is just never reaching your conscious mind as images. Even people who have had the "split brain" surgery due to epilepsy are able to do complex visual tasks; they just cannot articulate what they are doing with words. I can't find the video, but, they interviewed someone with this condition, and asked him to parse a visually ambiguous painting. He couldn't say how he interpreted it, but when given a pencil and paper, he could express it visually. So that would explain when people say that they can only recall a verbal description of something, I think that their brain actually is creating an image of it, but it is just not appearing in their mind's eye. This could also explain why some studies have shown that people with aphantasia are just as competent, if not slightly better, at solving complex visual puzzles. So, perhaps if you cannot imagine what something looks like, you might still be able to draw it.

ALittleLight 7y ago

I learned of my own aphantasia while watching an episode of House with my roommate. In the show they had a machine which let them view a rough picture of what a subject was thinking of. I observed to my roommate that this was an especially dumb plot point as people don't actually think in images but only in words. My roommate was quite confused and claimed that he did think in visuals and we had an interesting conversation and Google search thereafter. I still am slightly torn between thinking that there is some disconnect in explanation versus believing that some or even most people can actually visualize things in their mind. When I think of a "square", for example, I have access to all the facts I know of squares (polygon with four equal length edges) and I could draw a square or trace one in the air with my finger, so I obviously know what one looks like, but I have no visual experience of a square and it's difficult to imagine that other people do. One reason it's difficult to imagine other people have the visual imagination they think they do is because I so rarely see people just sitting and imagining things for long stretches - which I assume would be borderline irresistible if you had the kind of fantasy machine to show you whatever you wanted. Perhaps people do this in private and don't talk about it much?

mistersys 7y ago
When I imagine a yellow square, for example, I definitely visualize it. I can re-shape it, combine it with other shapes, rotate it, and visualize it moving. But it's not like it's replacing my vision, it's more of a secondary display that you can only see individual thoughts for a split second. If I close my eyes, I can do this better, and I actually have spent hours visualizing places I've been, or creating new ones. When I visualize my old homes and cities I've lived, it's like I have super speed and I can dash anywhere, but it's like a video with a very low frame rate, I see individual pictures and they combine with my spatial awareness to give my the feeling of moving. The frames are also very "low resolution", but it doesn't feel fuzzy but more like the frames are so quick that you can't pick out many details. In terms of words, I'm often thinking about memories I see on the "memory film", but the pictures themselves aren't words at all, my internal dialog vs. my visualization are 2 separate processes.
- fallingfrog 7y ago
  With me if I imagine something it’s vivid enough that it blocks out my actual vision. I’ve had people stand and wave at me and I just stared at a point in space and didn’t see them because I was picturing something.
itronitron 7y ago
Visualization is something that lends itself to practice. I remember discussing this with one of my art teachers years ago as they said that they have a complete artist's studio in their head in which they will create things mentally before, or in addition to, creating artwork in a real studio. Their analogy on how vivid the visualization is that it is similar to hearing your thoughts versus hearing yourself say something. Whether it is worth the time to go through the effort of visualizing something depends a lot on the task at hand, the cost of making mistakes working it out for real versus working it out mentally beforehand. It's not like virtual reality but it does save me a lot of time in figuring out how to construct and put things together, or identify promising design paths.
dan_mctree 7y ago
It's generally referred to as day dreaming when people do step into their 'imagination devices'. Personally I do that quite a lot, especially in dead moments like on the bus. I find it to be more entertaining than using a mobile phone with terrible internet. Though, it's probably not amazing as you might imagine. For most people, visually imagining things isn't as vivid as real life, it lacks detail, and there aren't really any surprises in what you imagine. But most of all, if you're used to this 'power', it just feels mundane. Someone who can't walk might assume that walking is an amazingly pleasurable experience, but for someone who walks every day, it doesn't particularly feel very special. And indeed, the contents of what I imagine are rarely something I talk about. It feels private, and like dreams, it's hard to convey the experience to others. You might also not recognize it if I do share something about my daydreams. Suppose I said: 'I was thinking of going to the beach', then you might assume I was thinking more along the lines of your typical thought experiences, while I was actively visualizing said beach.
- saltcured 7y ago
  I would also add that day-dreaming is often discouraged in children. So, there is social pressure to conform, beyond any in-built physiological process which might also suppress this fantasy play activity as we develop. My wakeful mind's eye is very abstract, representing space, forms, concepts, and connectivity. There is almost no sensory component to it. At best, I can form a fleeting visual which I might liken to a retinal after-image (such as glancing at a bright scene and then staring at a blank, dim wall). And, like such an after-image, I cannot change my focus to attend to a part of image. Chasing the image will erase it. However, my more abstract mental visualization lets me manipulate spatial structures, rotate them, decompose them, zoom inside them, etc. It is roughly the same for me with sounds. There is an internal experience of the spectra and dynamics which is almost identical between real listing and imagination or memory. But, there is a layer of actual ear sensation which is missing. Compared to the after-images of visual imagination, I can imagine sounds closer to the real thing. They are almost like having a TV playing quietly at night. I think my other senses are similar. I can abstractly remember or imagine touch, smell, taste, proprioception, and internal senses like arousal, hunger, pain, and nausea. But, these too are a bit abstracted and at arm's length. I used to think of myself as highly visual, but my understanding of it becomes more nuanced with age, and with hearing how other people characterize themselves. I don't really think "in pictures" but I also certainly do not think "in words". I especially do not have an internal narrative nor monologue, and have to put effort into rendering my thoughts into words. When planning or anticipating, I might imagine future scenarios including what I and others would say in conversation, and I imagine those almost the same as memories described above. I might conjur a person's mood, posture, tone of voice, and word choices. But I forecast non-verbal activities in much the same way, i.e. a hike along a windy ridge with a hawk circling above, or a dive into a swimming pool with bubbles streaming along my skin.
lonelappde 7y ago
Suppose you need a fork, and you send me to go to your home to get one. Talk me through how to find your home and your kitchen and your silverware drawer. Can you do all that without picturing any of it?
- Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
  Not the person you're responding to, but I also think I have a substantial degree of aphantasia (my "mind images" are quite weak and inconcrete) after reading about the subject in the past. Interesting exercise. If you ask me to explain that, I do think in a kind of abstract first-person 3D map of the street and my home, which can be pretty accurate in terms of scale, angles, etc. and it is helpful enough to accurately perform the task at hand of describing how to find the fork. But I can't really say I picture it in any meaningful way. Things have no color, but I can't say that they are black and white either, they are just the concept of an object of a given shape occupying a given space. When I mentally go to my home's door, I can stop and think about what color the door is (only with one object at a time) but this feels more like assigning the concept of whiteness to the abstract idea of the door being there, than like evoking an image of the door.
- ALittleLight 7y ago
  I can give directions without picturing things and actually can't "picture" things at all. Although I can metaphorically "picture" things where I think about the thing and what I know of it. To direct you to forks, I'd say "stand in the kitchen facing the bar, forks are in the right most drawer." I don't need to picture anything because I've committed directions like these to memory so that I can find forks and things myself. I don't mean that I've memorized phrases like that and I'm constantly chanting them to myself, but it's more like I have a memory of that fact and can serialize my memory into those words. I couldn't tell you things that I didn't memorize - e.g. is the silverware drawer wider than other drawers? How many drawers are in my kitchen? Is there a handle on the drawer? What does it look like?
pbhjpbhj 7y ago
>I so rarely see people just sitting and imagining things for long stretches // You've heard of daydreaming though, or the mind's eye. I assume they're cross-culturally universal concepts? For my own part my teachers always told me off for daydreaming. When lying in bed as a child I would watch cartoons in my head (whilst awake, before falling asleep). I can think of a table without picturing one, choose to picture an actual table (eg the one from my childhood home, perhaps on the day my dad revarnished it), or have a sort of meta-table before my mind's eye (cf Bertrand Russell!). The image of that table from my childhood isn't just a photo, it's like a cubist table, I can simultaneously 'see' different aspects of it despite them not being contiguous - like the top surface, the feet and the underside bolts; I can also feel it like a "mind's touch", and similarly with other senses. Scents tend only to appear fully in the context of memory though, or at least they're much stronger in that context (my mother cooking gingerbread, say; or the smell of my grandparents kitchen [poorly burnt gas!]).
marcinzm 7y ago
>One reason it's difficult to imagine other people have the visual imagination they think they do is because I so rarely see people just sitting and imagining things for long stretches - which I assume would be borderline irresistible if you had the kind of fantasy machine to show you whatever you wanted. Perhaps people do this in private and don't talk about it much? I'm guessing we're wired by evolution to put less value on the imaginary since those prone to it wouldn't have done as well. Some people, however, are prone to spending their time in imagination and there's some research on it as a mental disorder. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maladaptive_daydreaming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maladaptive_daydreaming.
- FPGAhacker 7y ago
  The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
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.
- carapace 7y ago
  > 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 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.
- FPGAhacker 7y ago
  This is amazingly strange to me. Not about the music, but the lack of imagery. If someone asked you what your favorite scene in a movie is, how would you respond? It would seem to me that fiction books would be exceptionally boring if I was not able to visualize what I was reading. If someone asked you to draw a sketch of your bedroom, could you? what would you be basing it on?
  - 7y ago
bostonpete 7y ago
For me the visual replay is available if I need to go back and extract information about the scene that I didn't register or consider significant at the time. It's certainly not high enough fidelity/accuracy or continuous enough to just sit and replay memories in my head unless maybe I'm trying to get to sleep...
jodrellblank 7y ago
I have no visual experience of a square and it's difficult to imagine that other people do. It’s difficult to imagine that you don’t, I’m tempted to suggest that you think visual imagination must take over the eyes and appear as if in front of a person, and if it’s not that vivid it must not be visual. But that doesn’t appear to be what you’re saying. How do you imagine the Nike swoosh or the McDonald’s Golden Arches or the Mona Lisa or the Eiffel Tower or the moon or anything which doesn’t have a nice spatial reference like forks in your kitchen or a clean fact-based shape like a square? I can picture Tom and Jerry but not in any way where I could follow the lines and draw them or even answer questions like how big their eyes are compared to their noses, but it’s still visual and pictorial in some sense. A square, I can “see” it as a white outline on a black background, or like a primary coloured filled blob like MS Paint style or Mondrian painting style, and not anything about it being a right angled parallelogram those are uncertain tenuous words that might change one day or be disconnected and reconnected to another shape.
- ALittleLight 7y ago
  Words are really the best way to describe my inner thoughts. Thinking of the Nike Swoosh - I know it as a bulging white check mark. That's about all the information I have on it available to conscious access. A visual representation of it must be stored somewhere, because I'm confident that I'd notice the difference between a genuine and obviously counterfeit Swoosh if I were confronted with it and could see it. For all the other things you mention I'd describe them as you might describe them in text. That's just how I think about them too. If I was trying to describe everything I noticed from a visit to McDonald's I might say something like "I noticed the golden arches, which seemed like an M with gentle curves at the top, perhaps twenty feet high" or something like that. Somewhat like recounting memories from a book you've read.
  - FPGAhacker 7y ago
    How would you describe an M, and why? I mentioned in another comment, it seemed to me that books of fiction would be exceptionally boring if I couldn't visualize them. Really good books, I stop seeing words as I read. I asked someone else this: what are your dreams like?
FPGAhacker 7y ago
What are your dreams like?
apostacy 7y ago
I strongly suspect that you are recalling and processing images, but that it is just never reaching your conscious mind as images. Even people who have had the "split brain" surgery due to epilepsy are able to do complex visual tasks; they just cannot articulate what they are doing with words. I can't find the video, but, they interviewed someone with this condition, and asked him to parse a visually ambiguous painting. He couldn't say how he interpreted it, but when given a pencil and paper, he could express it visually. So that would explain when people say that they can only recall a verbal description of something, I think that their brain actually is creating an image of it, but it is just not appearing in their mind's eye. This could also explain why some studies have shown that people with aphantasia are just as competent, if not slightly better, at solving complex visual puzzles. So, perhaps if you cannot imagine what something looks like, you might still be able to draw it.