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by Al-Khwarizmi 999 days ago
I consider myself to have aphantasia (cannot visualize anything in my mind, except when dreaming) and I think I could still pass the test you mention.

If I imagine a car, I can imagine its features, and of course color being a quite salient feature I would probably assign it a color (e.g. I could imagine a red Ferrari, or a black limo). It's just that I wouldn't see it, there wouldn't be anything in my mind similar to the actual experience of seeing a red object, I would just think about the "concept" of the car being red (hard to explain).

So far I've never found a way in which aphantasia really manifests externally or can be measured externally in a more or less reliable way. Which is why I'm still not 100% sure that people who claim not to be aphantasiacs aren't just exaggerating or taking metaphors too literally...

1 comments

People without aphantasia can recall details about things that they didn't notice when they first looked at it, because they can "look at it again" in their mind.

I can't recall anything I didn't actively notice while looking. If you stop me when I'm leaving a grocery store and ask me questions about the cashier, I won't be able to tell you their hair color or what kind of clothes they were wearing. Sometimes I won't even be able to tell you if they were tall or fat or any other physical adjectives.