[glaukopis]

This describes my experience perfectly. I feel like when people discuss aphantasia online, the word "seeing" gets overloaded to both refer to the act of picking up visual stimuli through the optic nerve, as well as a conceptualization action. When I "see" things in my mind's eye, I'm referring exclusively to the latter, and I think most people with normal visualization abilities do the same.

Due to the confusion of language as well as the testimonies of some rare people with incredibly vivid mental images that are on par with actual physical sight, I thought I might have aphantasia for a period of time, but after reading up on it, I feel like aphantasia is a much stronger condition than most people on the internet think it is. "Just seeing black" when you try to visualize something isn't enough - it seems like that's just a sign of being a person with a fairly typical brain who's using the word "see" in its literal sense.

For example, in the star test (https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/aioyga/simple_a...), if I was a person who understood "see" in the first sense, I'd say that I was a 1. If I instead switch to using the second sense of the word, I'd easily be a 6.

It feels like any test that asks you to rate the vividness of the item you "see" in your mind's eye will fall prey to this problem. I saw a comment on HN where the commenter suggested asking someone to visualize an elephant in profile, and then ask them which way the trunk is facing to see if they're aphantasic or not. I'd also suggest that if you ever imagined a person running beside your car while you were taking a road trip as a child, you also probably don't have aphantasia.

[mdswanson]

A better experiment, IMO: https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/cpwimq/ball_on_...

[yoz-y]

According to that test, I’d have Aphantasia, I guess. I could answer none of the questions immediately, even though I can imagine a table and a ball and somebody pushing it. I guess visually it would be like if you replaced a ball on a picture by the text “ball” and made the table out of “table” labels.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Why should that be better? I've read that and had a myriad of possible visualizations, beginning with some billiard ball on a pool table(which of them?), over some larger ball on a garden table, to tennis balls(which color? they come in neon yellow, orange, pink and even green!), and whatnot else. It only makes sense to abstract all the possibilities out, and ask how the EFFING EFF should I know?!