> My sense of visualisation is often not so strong, in the sense that I don't get to imagine vivid situations during the day, unless I'm recalling something I'v

> My sense of visualisation is often not so strong, in the sense that I don't get to imagine vivid situations during the day, unless I'm recalling something I've seen. What I've noticed is that when I'm sleepy, it becomes exponentially easier to visualise things I've never seen. I can somewhat relate. If I close my eyes, I have only a blank, black space and canon conjure up any mental imagery. But I dream and daydream in varying degrees of vividness. So it is kind of like, if I am actively trying to do it, there is no mental workspace available to drawn the image, but under those conditions of lower consciousness/attention, suddenly some imagery appears. So this is also interesting, because I can tell the difference. Some people disbelieve that I have this partial form of aphantasia, and of course I cannot conceive of how to convince them, but I know at least for myself that it is possible to have vivid mental pictures, because of these different times when the canvas is blank and when it is filled. I wish I could recall vivid mental images on demand! So regarding your first point. There are two (at least) ideas about how mental representations exist, depictive and propositional. Depictive is like thinking about a cat and having the actual image of the cat depicted in your mind to some degree of vividness. Propositional is like having a representation of features in your neural networks, and seeing or thinking about a cat activates the diverse set of catness neurons in your brain and you get a sense of a cat but maybe don't see an actual cat anywhere in your mind's eye (because maybe like me you don't have a conscious mind's eye). It seems reasonably likely that these are complementary rather than competing models of brain construction, and some people tend more or all the way one way and others the other way. See, e.g., https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1504933112 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1504933112