[looki]

A few counter-questions to poke at your hypothesis:

Are you able to imagine sound? To me, imagining and hearing sound, and imagining and seeing images are equivalent relations. It seems obvious to me, but of course since we're talking about the literal differences of the way human minds can function here, I can see how it might not be to some.

Do you dream at all? I can still picture a lot of scenes from my most vivid dreams.

Do you read fiction? It's hard to imagine what's that like if I can't, well, paint a picture of the scenes you're trying to imagine, like in a movie.

(edited to clarify the last sentence)

[graeme]

I'm mildly aphantadic. I can see flashes of image, but can't hold them, and with little colour. I feel this has worsened with time.

However, I can know where objects are in a room and am excellent at navigating a city in my mind. It's like the data is there, but I can't visualize it, if that makes sense.

Music and sound recall is excellent. I have good memory of spoken words, and I can play songs in my head in what seems like full detail.

I dream. I kept a dream journal for a while and had a lot of detail. Though, I think I had more visualization then. I can definitely still recall dreams with a lot of detail though. But it's like my waking thoughts: the images aren't vivid.

Fiction is easy. I don't have visuals in the rest of my life, so I'm hardly missing them there. I think the same thing happens where I imagine a room with objects, but I just can't quite see it. But it's there.

What is hard is poetry, most of it I simply can't get into. There are a few exceptions. I've liked some ancient greek stuff, and I liked Felix Dennis. But most is just dull for me.

I'm not really into hiphop and it occurs to me this could be part of it....

[barryp]

(not the person you're replying to, but as someone with aphantasia I'll bite...)

I can imagine sounds extremely well. For songs I feel like I have a CD player in my head, remembering even surprisingly subtle nuances and bits of a song. No musical background at all - maybe I should have been one.

Dreams are sometimes extremely vivid - sometimes I wake up astonished and the colors and the imagery I saw, but the memory quickly fades. After finding out about aphantasia I'm frustrated to hear that others can do the same thing while awake.

Read tons and tons of SciFi for the last 40 years. No images through, it's like listening to a radio play. Maybe that's why I'm drawn to movies, TV, and comic books - for the supplied visual material.

[ajkjk]

I am aphantasiac. I can imagine sound, but I bet it's not the way a person who 'hears it' does.

I play piano and sing (badly), so when I imagine sounds it's imagining moving the muscles to create them -- either my fingers or vocal chords. By 'imagining moving' I mean similar to subvocalization or imagining, like, throwing a ball or something -- there is clearly some interaction between my muscles and my brain when I do it, like it is simulating the muscle activations necessary without actually executing them.

[Lerc]

I imagine sounds, better than most people I think. I wouldn't say I hear the sounds I play in my head but I can run a recording though my head and sense, for example, the differences between two instances of the same tune, like switching back and forth between a live and studio recording of a song in my head.

It makes me particularly good at identifying tunes from the first few notes.

I dream, my memory of dreams is much worse than most.

I used to read a lot of fiction, I don't anymore due to depression, when I finished a book it tended to send me into a crash.

When I did read fiction the words on the page were what was happening. It feels to me like painting a scene from the words and then looking at it with your mind's eye to get the experience is just a middle step that I skip, the words provide the experience directly.