[rogerclark]

"In my head, the way it happens is..." Okay, sure, man. Whatever you say.

Decades of research have proven that people cannot be trusted to describe how their own minds work. We are unreliable narrators of our own experience even in the best conditions, and having a zeitgeisty, quirky trait like aphantasia to wear as a badge will obviously skew the results even further.

Personally, I don't believe for a second that there are a significant number of sighted, otherwise typical human beings out there who have zero ability to visualize anything. Of course, people get better at things with practice, so I buy that some people might be better at it than others. I couldn't recall melodies very well before studying music for several years. But if you know what an apple looks like, and you can describe that or draw it, even crudely, then you have some inner representation of what an apple looks like. Whatever words you use to convey your internal experience of recalling or assembling the relevant information are inconsequential.

[eplawless]

Here's a recent study which provides physiological evidence of aphantasia: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220420092150.h...

[kagakuninja]

Sorry, that is how it is. I am a meditator, and recently taking a class on tantra, I can't visualize for shit. Other people are seeing fucking Avalokiteshvara dressed in silk and jewels, I just see a fuzzy void.

I've also had lucid dreams where I am flying around in a gray void. Interestingly, I have had some hypnogogic states where I could see a page of writing, but I have no ability to summon any image at will.

[RoyalHenOil]

I tend to agree. I think we just vary somewhat in how aware we are of our internal processes, with most of those processes being unconscious.

For example, I am very adept at art, particularly color and shading, yet I struggle to consciously imagine color or shading. I can consciously imagine 3-dimensional shapes and rotate them, but I struggle with any other visual data.

And yet I demonstrably CAN generate other visual data because I can draw and paint things, even things I have never seen before.

Clearly my brain is actually doing that work, even if I am just not conscious of it, thus I don't ascribe aphantasia to myself. My brain is perfectly functional in this area.

[loa_in_]

If you stop listening to arguably the best autonomous systems around describe how they work you lose hope to find out how they're working. Provable and true are two separate things.