I emailed Adam Zeman (the neurologist who coined the term being discussed here) a while back seeking clarification about exactly what the experience of visualiz

I emailed Adam Zeman (the neurologist who coined the term being discussed here) a while back seeking clarification about exactly what the experience of visualizing something should be like -- pasting the thread below. His replies were short, but he managed to pack into them not only a comprehensible answer to my question, but also hinted at something I really hadn't expected in his two-word final reply: "Pseudo- mostly..." To clarify, a pseudohallucination is a "hallucination" that you know isn't real. A hallucination, strictly speaking, is imaginary sensory input that you don't realize is imaginary. So, his reply seems to suggest that he's encountered people whose hyperphantasic pseudohallucinations (being able to overlay vivid visualizations onto the field of stuff they're actually seeing with their actual eyes) sometimes cross the line into bona fide hallucinations; i.e., they lose track, even if only temporarily, of what's real and what's imagined. Which is just endlessly fascinating. Readers/commenters on this topic may find it interesting -- sorry, most of it is me going on about what my visualization is like, but I guess it forms the necessary backdrop for some of his answer to be useful anyway. This topic, or the comments diverging from it, also seems to overlap with the topic of "unsymbolized thinking"; I've dumped some more stuff of possible interest on that: https://www.pastery.net/vvapdr/ https://www.pastery.net/vvapdr/ with a bit of context in another comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40774163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40774163 ======== Me: ======== Hi, I'm looking for some clarification on the exact nature of visualization as I'm not sure what it's meant to be like. The Wikipedia article on aphantasia mentions activation of the visual cortex. So am I supposed to be generating an actual visual input that I feel like I can see with my eyes? When I visualize something, it's not really there on that literal visual level. I physically see the inside of my eyelids and the visualized image is not projected such that I feel like my eyes are actually seeing it. Instead it's somewhere else; sometimes it feels as if it's somewhere behind my eyes. Nonetheless, the image can be vivid in its own way, precise and consistent. I can rotate and manipulate it. I can move a light source around the object and "see" the shadow change, or place my point of quasi-view within a scene. This comes along with mental impressions of other sensory inputs that, similarly, are "vivid" but clearly not actually being sensed from the outside world. Is this what it's supposed to be? What point on the scale would reflect this in the visualization quiz? Thanks ======== Adam: ======== …it sounds to me as if you are in the 3-4/5 territory…seeing imagery as if you were ‘really’ seeing is the exception, but for most of us visual imagery has a visual ‘feel’, which sounds to be the case for you… ======== Me: ======== Thanks for the reply. To clarify, the "really seeing" exception is akin to a visual hallucination, or rather pseudohallucination? ======== Adam: ======== Pseudo- mostly…