What I'm taking away from this thread is that even apart from aphantasia or its absence, there's probably a wide gradient or even multidimensional space of visu

What I'm taking away from this thread is that even apart from aphantasia or its absence, there's probably a wide gradient or even multidimensional space of visualization capacities. If I try to "look" at an elephant in my imagination: * I "see" an elephant's head and shoulders at a kind of oblique angle. It's far less real than external vision and significantly less real than dream or hypnagogic imagery. * The colours feel real, but there is very far from a photorealistic level of detail. It's not hazy or anything, it's just that my brain won't flesh out a piece until I force it to by focusing on that specific part. "Head of an elephant" is not a fine-grained enough part. * The experience of parts being unresolved is a kind of vague sense of an approximate shape/size/colour/texture off at some vector relative to my focus or to the scene. There's a blob over there shaped sorta like a trunk, and it feels this way and is kind of grey. The background is a sort of straw/blue savanna kind of scene with literally no detail. * There doesn't tend to be a lot of motion, and I don't think I'm ever surprised by things like a visualization 'winking' at me. If there's motion it tends to be small repetitive things like gentle swaying, or a kind of 0.5–1fps discontinuous scene update. It feels like mostly my capacity for visual imagination comes from the same circuits that are able to recognize external images. The elephant imagery is in barely more detail than I imagine I need to identify whether a thing I'm looking at fits "elephant" or not and to determine whether or not to be surprised by the details of that elephant's visual presentation. It seems like people with aphantasia can't project that model into their awareness in a generative way. It also seems like there are people with quite a bit more ability to embellish those models than I have.