First hearing of aphantasia, I believed it was a miscommunication. Surely everyone has about the same experience but just describes it differently? Through focused thought over the past few years, I have some greater ability to visualize than I did before. With this evidence, I no longer believe it is a difference in communication, but truly a difference in experience.
With my current visualization/memory abilities I still can do many typical things you might imagine "require" visualization. I struggle with many other things too.
- I can close my eyes and walk (reasonably well) around my house.
- I can look at a photo of a 3d object and select a rotated variant from a list of options (common in internet iq tests)
- I can imagine a rubik's cube, but get confused if I try to do really anything past a single operation.
- When practiced, I can somewhat do the mental abacus - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_abacus
- I can't mind palace really much at all.
- I am at the "dim and vague" step on the attached article.
Other than the strange hallucination here and there, I've never had any internal audio.
Interested in other people's experiences.