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It's a spectrum and I think your experience is probably typical. A minority of people see nothing and another minority of people see vivid images. Most people get varying degrees of fuzziness.

I see vivid images of pretty much everything except faces. Faces are blurry (but then I can't recognize people's faces in the street and instead rely heavily on contextual clues, what they were, etc...)

I consider myself aphantasic and would describe my process similarly. I can kind of "draw" shapes in my head with sort of strokes of light like a kid writing their name in the air with a sparkler. While doing it, I can in fact feel my eyes physically moving around under their lids. Anything that isn't a rudimentary shape is out. This comes in handy while thinking about software because I can pretty easily create and trace connections between things in a sort of imaginary network.

I experience basically the same thing with sounds, which I've never heard anyone talk about. If you ask me to imagine the guitar solo from "sweet child of mine", I'm not going to hear the actual song in my head, I'm going to hear essentially the same thing as if you asked me to describe it (with lots of beedly dee type sounds). I can recognize a person's voice, but I can't will it into existence without hearing it, instead I would hear my own imitation of them, however bad that is. I'm not sure if that's a common experience but media tells me it's not.

This sounds very similar to my experience as well. Memory and mental visualization are very fuzzy. Like a camera with a dirty lens and very narrow focus. I can't even imagine my wife or children's faces clearly. I can picture an environment, but it's like a low res image or impressionistic painting.

I can think very clearly in text however, so I can imagine vivid descriptions of a physical environment and with descriptions of fine detail. But it's stored as text, and only blurrily rendered to images.

Recently, I've gradually realized that I struggle to recognize faces and some significant chunk of my social anxiety comes from this. If I see a face often enough or in large enough doses I can recognize it, but if I see it only occasionally and for brief encounters, I really struggle. I think it may be related to my inability visualize.

I think I used to be able to visualize earlier but by the time I learned about aphantasia I had already gone years without it.

Why I cannot say.

Sometimes when I get a lot of sleep and relaxation I think I can visualize in ny head.

Oh, and I can visualize at least one relative, but only a certain passport image of that person.

And I can draw to some degree, so I clearly know roughly what things look like even if I cannot visualize it internally.

A key thing here is that you can train the ability to visualise. You probably don't spend very long per day trying to picture your friend's face with the glasses and mustache, but if you did, you'd find that over time, your ability would increase.

This is just normal. I wouldn't overthink it. If you were truly "aphantasic", you'd know; if you truly had preternatural visualization abilities, you'd know.

Respectfully, you don’t know which experience is really normal (most common)

It's easy to infer which is normal based on one's experience of the world. The world would be very different if it were otherwise.

But all the comments in this thread show how different the experiences are. Personally, I can’t tell after reading all of them (and previous HN discussions too) which is common and which is uncommon: clear, fuzzy, abstract, or zero visualization.

Experience of the world, not HN...

I think that's normal. At least that's also how it works for me.

Yeah I’m exactly the same. It’s like I can “visualize” my proprioceptive sense for where things are in space but it’s more like a lidar map.

that's basically what I experience. When I learned that many artists picture their entire drawing in detail, and then put it down on page roughly as they imagine it, I couldn't even imagine that.

I wonder where you learned that. To my knowledge, there are only very few artists who work that way.

Source: can draw pretty well myself, do not use this method.

i heard this from my art class teachers when I was growing up, and from a few friends who went on to be comic strip artists. However, going back and reading a few interviews of my friend, it seems like he actually imagines fairly simplified storyboards before drawing them, not a wholly formed final image.

This is not how artists work at all. I don't think any school of art has done that, other than for very rough composition (where objects go in space). Most schools of art from deep history all the way to today train with copying/sketching from life (training the eye to go where you want it), while also teaching general truths about light, color, proportion and anatomy.

People who draw out of thin air usually have these trained references in mind, so when they draw a pose they're not so much simply copying from their imagination, but from facts and past experience, about knowing about anatomy, light, and proportion. You draw as you go and see what's on the page, and you can build out a world that didn't exist, but not so much from mind's eye, but somewhere in-between the page and prior experience.

None of the above training or sketching would be needed by someone with a photographic memory or an imagination that can hold that level of mass detail (they'd only need to know practical techniques their medium depends on). There have been people like that such as Austin Osman Spare, but in the main the vast development in art has to do with learning about anatomy, proportion, light, color, and technique as taught by all the great masters.

Cartoons are a good example how a style comes not so much from the imagination, but how one very naively and simply draws characters and then builds off that natural style into something refined. This comes from playing on the page, not imagining what one wants. If you copy other people's cartoons you can also learn different lessons, and that has to do with training the eye and technique.