[justbees]

My mom has aphantasia and we were both shocked to discover it even exists.

She saw something about it online and then started asking everyone in the family if they could picture an apple in their mind. We all said - yes of course, what are you talking about?

And she said, "When you say the word apple, I think of the concept of an apple. It's juicy. It's crisp. It's red, etc, but I don't SEE an apple. I just know what it is."

She had no concept that other people literally saw the apple and I had no concept that people couldn't see the apple.

I asked her what she thought the phrase "in your minds eye" meant for her entire life and she said she thought it just meant exactly what she was describing and not literally seeing anything...

[estearum]

Yeah this was my experience too as a near-complete aphantasic. Doing the apple test around the dinner table was enlightening, and it also made a whole lot of other things make sense through my life as well: I have virtually no concrete memories from a first-person point of view (I remember the fact that events happened, I do not remember subjectively being there)

It's unfortunately very insulting when someone says, "hey remember when we did that very important thing together?" and my answer has always been "uhh... I remember that we did it?"

[justbees]

That's so interesting to me! I actually have a terrible memory for events and names so my answer is almost always - sort of. So I can visualize an apple, but if you say - remember that time we went apple picking with Greg? I might only vaguely remember that, and not know who Greg is. But, if you showed me a picture of Greg I would probably say - oh that's that guy we went apple picking with. Why did we do that?