Aphantasia: Not Everyone Can Picture Things

Articles like this show up on HN a couple times a year, and it's about the only time I think about this. I don't think my brain is particularly abnormal, but the concept of closing my eyes and seeing something is so foreign to me that I can scarcely believe it's the norm. It makes me want to go do an fMRI (or whatever) study to see if my visual cortex has any activity when I try to imagine things. I used to feel like I was being overly-pedantic about the phenomenon, but the more I read articles like this, the more convinced I am that I have aphantasia.

I can navigate fine. I can't draw well, but I could roughly draw a map of my house or neighborhood. I'd do so by starting with one specific point (say the front door of my house) and sort of incrementally thinking about what's adjacent to it as I might pan my field of view around. Move into the kitchen and it's "ok, there's the fridge, and next to that is the counter, and there's a coffee maker, and next to that is the stove". I know the fridge is stainless steel, the counter is marble, the stove is black, it has four knobs, there's more counter, then the sink, etc. But I don't think I "see" or "visualize" any of that. I certainly don't visualize colors or reflections. My car has two different colors (blue and grey Honda Element), but despite looking at it many times a day, I couldn't tell you in much detail which parts are which colors.

I'm still not 100% sure if I'm misunderstanding what it means to "picture" something, but the more I read about aphantasia the more convinced I am that I have it. The idea of visualizing something is completely foreign to me. Even simple shapes. If you say "picture a triangle" I don't feel like I "see" anything, even though I can explain what a triangle is and draw one.

Behavioral and Neural Signatures of Visual Imagery Vividness Extremes: Aphantasia versus Hyperphantasia https://academic.oup.com/cercorcomms/article/2/2/tgab035/626...

Recently I kept dreaming text, like headlines. Problem was as I read the words they kept changing, except one occasion when I got a real but puzzling sentence. Should have written it down because now it's gone.