[theobromananda]

I do not get the ego angle, but I am also skeptic of aphantasia. My own experience could be described by either 1 ("no image") or 5 ("perfectly vivid") in any questionaire concerning it - when I imagine anything, there is no image at all, yet I know I "see" something. E.g. I can think of a barn, and there is the mental impression of the shape, the color and so on, yet nothing at all is seen. I believe most of the difference is, as always, semantics: What does "seeing" an image mean internally? Some people who believe that they have aphantasia believe that there should be an image in front of their eyes when they close it - that is nonsense. It does not help that others who can imagine describe imagination in the same terms.

When I think of an abstract idea, the sense of imagination is exactly the same as if I was imagining a picture: there is an impression, but it is not one of the sense but one of mind.

The difference can be clearly seen with the use of psychedelics that do create real inner seeing: tryptamines like LSD only strengthen the internal knowing of mental imaginery (plus of course visual artifacts, warping etc. in the actual visual field), yet the combination of LSD and ketamine creates the famous "free-wheeling hallucinations" in which you enter a perfectly lucid photorealistic 3D dream which you can shape in any way you desire. Tropane alkaloids create real hallucinations which you experience instead of reality, but I have no experience with this. Classical psychedelics do not create hallucinations but only mental imaginery and visual morphing.

[interroboink]

I think another person in this thread pointed out a good example — reading a book, then being disappointed when seeing the movie because the characters didn't look onscreen how they imagined them when reading. Not w/regard to the textual descriptions, but w/regard to the other visual bits that their mind filled in.

This is a widespread phenomenon; no shortage of examples. It has happened to me, too.

There are some people in this thread who claim they haven't experienced that, and had a hard time understanding what that would even mean. These seem like pretty different mental/visual experiences, so it seems reasonable to have a word to describe it.

I agree it's hard to measure such internal things exactly, and it's full of self-reporting problems, but the core concept doesn't seem like purely a semantics issue.

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Aside: I once had a conversation about thinking, and my friends were surprised at the idea of thinking without using words. But that is very much my experience! It is something I semi-trained myself to do (I felt that translating into words slowed me down), but I think it was a natural tendency, too. But it can be likewise difficult to convince someone it's a real thing without resorting to brain scans (: