"One example is when you ask people to draw a helicopter or a bicycle they produce nonsense simplifications or abstractions. Are they really visualizing these g

"One example is when you ask people to draw a helicopter or a bicycle they produce nonsense simplifications or abstractions. Are they really visualizing these goofy versions of the machines? If not, why don't they draw them accurately." Because they don't have the skill of drawing well. That's a trainable skill that is separate from being able to visualize things. Just because you can visualize (or actually see) something doesn't mean you can automatically draw it well. If it did, then we should expect that everyone could draw well as long as they're looking at the thing they're trying to draw. It doesn't work like that. If you ask someone untrained in drawing to draw a bicycle from memory, the result is what you describe: they produce a poor, loose schematic diagram of the major parts they remember. If the reason for that was what you say, then you should be able to get them to produce a much higher-quality drawing by putting them in front of an actual bicycle, but that's not what happens. Instead, you get a poor, loose schematic diagram of the major features they can see. Their crappy drawing may well include more of the parts a bicycle actually has, and so may be a more complete schematic diagram, but it won't be a better-quality drawing. If you ask a trained draughtsman to draw a bicycle from memory, you get a beautifully-rendered drawing of a bicycle, with probably some gaps and some inaccuracies, depending on how well they know (and therefore can visualize) bicycles. Put them in front of an actual bicycle and you'll get a beautifully-rendered drawing with more detail and greater accuracy. I went to an art school where the instructors insisted that everyone could learn to draw, and that they were going to teach everyone to do it, whether they believed they could do it or not. They proceeded to do exactly that by making us sign up for a grueling schedule of drawing instruction many hours every weekday, with a crushing load of drawing homework to do every week. Everyone learned to draw very well, including all of the students in the photography and theater programs who didn't believe they could do it and didn't see why they had to try. A person with aphantasia may be able to be trained to draw well from life, but presumably will have trouble drawing from memory or imagination. Many trained artists, however, can draw very well from memory or imagination. They can make beautiful drawings of things that are not in front of them, and even things that neither they nor anyone else has ever seen. The machine that you thought stupid was an extrapolation from work that has actually been done in imaging the visual content of people's dreams using fMRI. For example: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-figure-out-what-you-see-while-youre-dreaming-15553304/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-fig... Brains can produce and repropduce visual content, and fMRI can be used to determine what it is. For what it's worth, I can definitely visualize things in considerable detail with color, lighting and motion. I used to be able to do it better when I was younger, perhaps because I spent more time and effort doing it than I do now.