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What the other aphantasiac said. I can enjoy good visuals in a movie, it's just that I can't "replay" them. I think a good analogy may be food. I suppose most

What the other aphantasiac said. I can enjoy good visuals in a movie, it's just that I can't "replay" them. I think a good analogy may be food. I suppose most people don't have the ability to re-experience taste at will (I hope I'm not weird in that too)! If I ask you what is your favorite dish, you will perfectly know what it is, you will be able to describe the taste to me in a vague, conceptual way (using adjectives like "strong", "sweet", etc.) but you probably won't be able to just think about it and have its taste come to your mouth. It's not even that the memory of the taste isn't detailed enough. It probably is, because if one day the dish is too cooked, too salty, etc. you can probably notice. So you do know how it tastes exactly, it's stored in your memory. It's just that you can't re-experience it in your mind. And of course, this doesn't mean that you can't enjoy food! For me, the experience with movie scenes (or anything visual) is very similar to that. The Mona Lisa is stored in my memory, if you show me a copy of the real Mona Lisa and a copy with something changed (the hair, expression of her face, etc.) I can probably tell one from the other if it's not too subtle as well as anyone else, but there's just no explicit mind images involved in that, just like in the case with the food being too cooked. As for books, I enjoy them a lot, I have always been a book lover. But I do notice that I enjoy more the story, facts, events going on, than the imagery. Those books that have more than 2-3 consecutive pages of descriptions tend to bore me, I long for more action, more events. That's maybe the only consequence of aphantasia that I can think of in the "outer world", preference for one kinds of books over others. Because the funny thing is that, while it seems like a huge different internally, it really doesn't seem to affect skills or interactions with other people at all. In fact, the only tests of aphantasia I've seen are all subjective (they ask you about your mind images, or lack thereof). It's not like "try to solve this task, and if you can't, you have aphantasia". There don't seem to be real-world things that one can't do with aphantasia - in other conversations about this, people have mentioned the kind of puzzles with unfolded cubes where you have to know if they will be equal or not when you actually build the cube. But I can still solve them, I just don't have an image of the cubes rotating in my head with colors, drawings, etc. but I have the concept of "if I rotate the cube this way, this side will be rotated in such and such way" that allows me to solve the puzzle.

FPGAhacker 7y ago
Thanks for being so open in your reply. Part of me suspects this is perhaps just a minor variation in the brain’s handling/interpretation of information. There is tremendous variation in people’s ability to visualize and how concrete that visualization actually is. Some artists can completely visualize the art they want to create before picking up a tool. I’m only like that in the vaguest sense. Most of the time my imagination imagery is fleeting and difficult to hold on to. Like seeing something out of the corner of your eye, but when you turn to look, it’s gone. But my memory is either very visual or very sensory. I may not remember the details of some movie or other that I saw a year or two ago, but I will often still be able recall how it made me feel and whether I liked it or not. As for food and tasting, I do recall flavors as if I am tasting them again, but to borrow a phrase... it is as though through a mirror, darkly. It’s an echo of the real thing. Less real. Not satisfying.

FPGAhacker 7y ago

Thanks for being so open in your reply. Part of me suspects this is perhaps just a minor variation in the brain’s handling/interpretation of information. There is tremendous variation in people’s ability to visualize and how concrete that visualization actually is. Some artists can completely visualize the art they want to create before picking up a tool. I’m only like that in the vaguest sense. Most of the time my imagination imagery is fleeting and difficult to hold on to. Like seeing something out of the corner of your eye, but when you turn to look, it’s gone. But my memory is either very visual or very sensory. I may not remember the details of some movie or other that I saw a year or two ago, but I will often still be able recall how it made me feel and whether I liked it or not. As for food and tasting, I do recall flavors as if I am tasting them again, but to borrow a phrase... it is as though through a mirror, darkly. It’s an echo of the real thing. Less real. Not satisfying.