Do you have aphantasia?

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I find it hard to imagine how that would be like.

No.I can say that im definitely not a-phan of aphantasia.

Holy crap, no, thank god... that sounds like an utter nightmare.

I do. It's like a double freak whammy. INTP and aphantasia.

Holy crap, no, thank god... that sounds like an utter nightmare.

I can't picture what that'd be like

I find it hard to imagine how that would be like.

No, I have a very strong minds eye I've always been told.

I'm crap at remembering faces though.

I do. It's like a double freak whammy. INTP and aphantasia.

I can't picture what that'd be like

Almost completely, although I can easily do wireframes and simple polygon graphics for some reason.

Yes, I've had aphantasia my whole life, and it blew my mind when I learned about it because it explained so many difficult and awkward situations I've had in the past. Blake Ross's description is almost dead on to what I experience. I'd be happy to answer any questions about it, since most people I've talked to in real life about it don't really believe me or get it, or just think I'm not a "visual thinker" as opposed to wholly lacking a mind's eye.

In college, I majored in math and struggled horribly with geometric/topological type courses, while I did well in logic, abstract algebra, and other less visual fields. I remember sitting in office hours with a professor one time, and he was telling me to visualize a manifold in my head and imagine the slope of the tangent line to it as you move across the manifold, and I didn't know what the hell he wanted me to do. Until I learned about aphantastia, I honestly didn't know people could literally see pictures in their heads and I thought saying you were "seeing things in your head" was a figure of speech.

I have a friend in engineering who told me it's trivial for him to look at interconnected objects like pipes and then rotate them in his head to figure out visually how they must appear on the other side he can't see. That sounds like fucking witchcraft to me.

When I read a book, I don't imagine the characters' appearances or the appearance of the setting at all. I can't even describe how foreign of a concept that is to me. My experience of reading is that I'm deriving ideas from the book, like person A knows person B and thinks thoughts C and D and later has to do task E, but there's no visuospatial data accompanying this imagined scenario in my head.

I'm terrible at getting around new places. When I go on vacation, I visit lots of different areas, but I don't have a spatial sense in my mind of how they fit together. I can walk from one neighborhood to another, and not really have any idea how the two areas would appear in relation to another on a map. I have no ability to retrace my steps and visualize in my head how I got from point A to point B. You can take me back to somewhere I've already been by an alternate route, and most of the time it'll look new to me because there's no visual memory to compare it to. I can recognize landmarks, but there's no way I'd be able to describe to you how they look or draw them out on paper. Speaking of drawing, it never made any sense to me in art class when the teacher would say things like "Imagine the object as a composition of simpler shapes, like cubes and spheres". I get the idea conceptually, but I can't actually look at something and break it down in my head like that.

At the workplace, I've driven coworkers crazy because of my preference of outlines and tables over slides and flowcharts. I honestly get a lump in my throat when someone asks "Can you draw that out for me?" I usually end up just redrawing my outline with circles around each header with arrows pointing downward to the next one. And then someone else will say "Oh I see what you mean" and they'll take the pen and start making squares and circles and lines between stuff and ask "Do the topics relate like that?" and I have no idea how to convey that the subtle language of this visual layout means nothing to me and is nothing like the concept I have in my head.

Interestingly, I do have vision in my dreams. I've been told by some people that imagining things in your head is very similar to what it's like to dream. I definitely lack the ability to intentionally bring visual images to mind in that sense. I've also learned that daydreaming is more literal than I thought, and that people literally get lost in their thoughts because they're experiencing a visual component that distracts them from the outside world.

When people tell me to imagine a scenario in my head, I usually just have a dialog going mentally where I'm hearing my voice repeat the details of the situation to myself. Like if I'm supposed to meet someone, on my way to meet them, I'll be thinking "Okay, I'm meeting an older woman, gray hair, going to be driving a red Toyota Camry", but I'm not seeing any of those things. In my head, I'm just repeating that sentence to myself over and over in order to remember. I wish it were possible for me to just imagine an old lady in a car and be able to refer to the visual appearance of that memory for the details.

To get an idea of what it's like, imagine if I blindfolded you then drove you to a body of water you had never been to before. Still blindfolded, I walk you out onto what feels like a beach. You hear the birds over the waves crashing, and without any visual information, you can infer this is probably an ocean rather than a lake. Still blindfolded, I ask you, "What do you see?" Imagining it's an ocean beach, you take what you know about oceans and beaches and say "I can see straight to the horizon. Wide open ocean. Is that a huge barge out there? The waves are huge in this wind, and you can tell that it's low tide because the beach changes color here." You can't actually see any of this particular beach, but you know the characteristics of beaches and can describe one generically. That's pretty much the process I go through when someone says to me "Imagine you're on a beach. What do you see?"

Regarding other mental senses, I play the piano and can hear melodies and rhythms perfectly in my head. Playing by ear has always come naturally to me because I just compare what I play to what I hear in my head. I also hear my internal dialog speaking to me, as I mentioned earlier. So in that sense I understand what having a mind's eye could be like, and I'm envious of those who aren't mindblind.

tl;dr: My internal mental experience consists of language and sound

No, not at all.

No, not at all.

No, I have a very strong minds eye I've always been told.

I'm crap at remembering faces though.

Nope, I can visualize a lot of things with ease but at the same time, I can understand what it's like to be aphantasia.

Nope, I can visualize a lot of things with ease but at the same time, I can understand what it's like to be aphantasia.

Quite the opposite. If it wasn't for being able to spend most of my time at least partially in a fantasy reality inside my head, and imagine how my various interests and projects could be accomplished even if I lack the resources to implement them fully in meatspace, I believe I'd kill myself. That doesn't sound like an existence worth suffering through.

Quite the opposite. If it wasn't for being able to spend most of my time at least partially in a fantasy reality inside my head, and imagine how my various interests and projects could be accomplished even if I lack the resources to implement them fully in meatspace, I believe I'd kill myself. That doesn't sound like an existence worth suffering through.