[TeMPOraL]

I hope you'll get your diagnosis eventually.

> It also makes relationships difficult; I've been married four years and my wife is only now starting to actually understand and believe me when I say I didn't hear what she said (vs just not caring / not listening).

I feel for you. This reminded me of my recent discovery. You've probably seen this[0] image test circulating on social media the other day. Few days ago, when working with my wife through some issues between us, I showed this to her. To my utter disbelief, she scored 6. I score 2. 3 on a good day. Suddenly, both of us realized why we're getting annoyed with each other whenever talking about things like remodelling the kitchen, rearranging the living room, or planning the layout of a new flat. As it turns out, she truly can visualize everything in her head. And she now understands that I really do need to measure everything and drop it into CAD software before I'm ready to talk.

All because of a simple test that I only remembered because I've been obsessed with my aphantasia for over a year now. This makes me wonder: how many of such undiagnosed differences of perception are there between couples, that make living together difficult, because neither side can understand the other truly perceives the world differently?

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[0] - https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/aioyga/simple_a...

[existencebox]

This is something the wife and I have had many conversations about as well.

It sounds like we have an inverted situation to yours, where I was lucky to have a similar capability for visualization and spatial sense as your wife. This frustrated my wife and I to no end as she'd be driving the car and I'd say "you know you're basically riding the shoulder" and she would legitimately not realize the car was not centered. (To be clear, not from lack of attention, but from over-judging the distance from the left lane.) We had similar snips to your point about "can't you just visualize it in your head" (As it turns out, no, but I had trouble wrapping my head around that at first.)

For almost a decade this just ended up in recurring irritation and arguments whenever we drove together, until, and kinda to the point of the GP, we realized I _cannot differentiate dark objects on black backgrounds_, despite otherwise excellent visual acuity and response times. This may sound orthogonal to the car story, but to your point, after many inverses where she'd tease me about "well maybe you can't find your shirt just like I can't find the center of the road" we started to ask "wait maybe we both actually just really suck at this one class of task."

It's not quite as stark as the "can't visualize 3d fields" to be clear, but it was still a moment of "wait, we've just been living in completely different perceptual universes for a long long time now." (E.g. we'd be in a dark room, I'd walk into a wall or be unable to find anything, she would think I was making a bad joke or being obtuse.)

I tend to believe that this runs so so so much deeper than we know, and have made it the subject of some sci fi shorts that I've been hacking on. (That our mental models, ways of reasoning about the world, perceptions of reality, are truly distinct, the whole "what if what you think is green is blue to me" conundrum; and what happens when rational decisions coincide in pathological ways given varying, but individually rational and internally, although not externally consistent, perceptions)

[randomdata]

> As it turns out, she truly can visualize everything in her head.

Here I would have told you that I can visualize everything in my head... until I took the test – definite 1. I can visualize everything in some loose sense, but it is encoded differently. Like, to use a poor analogy, a computer can represent an image as binary digits. I can understand 6 in my mind. Perhaps I took the test too literally?

[TeMPOraL]

Nah, you have to take it literally. You score 6 if you can - while awake - conjure clear, colorful images in your head on demand, that you can manipulate. Based on my reading on the topic and talking with my wife, it's very close to arbitrary rendering in your field of vision.

With my score of 2, I also "encode differently". I can sort-of work with imaginary visual data in my head, but it feels like - excuse the bad analogy - like looking into a debugger hooked up to a program that tries to render something. I am aware of an imaginary object, I can manipulate it symbolically. I can stack transformations in my head, like "it's rotated horizontally", "and also on the other axis", and "it's red", but most of my manipulations happen at this symbolic layer. The rendering pipeline goes nowhere; if I focus, I can sometimes force an unclear image to appear briefly.

[randomdata]

Fascinating. In an earlier life I worked as a graphic designer and always felt I had a keen ability to accurately visualize the art in my head before putting pen to paper, so to speak. But never like having a canvas in front of me, definitely more symbolic like you describe.

I'm not sure I can completely relate to your experience with needing CAD, other than I've noticed that sometimes the real world is flipped to my mental model, which can lead to funny results when my actions are backwards. I can usually 'visualize' things like that, at least in some abstract sense.

Well, that is, except specifically when it comes to my bother and father. They can somehow explain things to each other and know exactly what they are talking about with ease, as if they have some kind of telepathic link. They can say the exact same thing to me and I'll have absolutely no clue as to what they are talking about until they draw a picture. Now you have me curious to know if they are able to score 6.