I observed to my roommate that this was an especially dumb plot point as people don't actually think in images but only in words. My roommate was quite confused and claimed that he did think in visuals and we had an interesting conversation and Google search thereafter.

I still am slightly torn between thinking that there is some disconnect in explanation versus believing that some or even most people can actually visualize things in their mind. When I think of a "square", for example, I have access to all the facts I know of squares (polygon with four equal length edges) and I could draw a square or trace one in the air with my finger, so I obviously know what one looks like, but I have no visual experience of a square and it's difficult to imagine that other people do.

One reason it's difficult to imagine other people have the visual imagination they think they do is because I so rarely see people just sitting and imagining things for long stretches - which I assume would be borderline irresistible if you had the kind of fantasy machine to show you whatever you wanted. Perhaps people do this in private and don't talk about it much?

And indeed, the contents of what I imagine are rarely something I talk about. It feels private, and like dreams, it's hard to convey the experience to others. You might also not recognize it if I do share something about my daydreams. Suppose I said: 'I was thinking of going to the beach', then you might assume I was thinking more along the lines of your typical thought experiences, while I was actively visualizing said beach.

My wakeful mind's eye is very abstract, representing space, forms, concepts, and connectivity. There is almost no sensory component to it. At best, I can form a fleeting visual which I might liken to a retinal after-image (such as glancing at a bright scene and then staring at a blank, dim wall). And, like such an after-image, I cannot change my focus to attend to a part of image. Chasing the image will erase it. However, my more abstract mental visualization lets me manipulate spatial structures, rotate them, decompose them, zoom inside them, etc.

It is roughly the same for me with sounds. There is an internal experience of the spectra and dynamics which is almost identical between real listing and imagination or memory. But, there is a layer of actual ear sensation which is missing. Compared to the after-images of visual imagination, I can imagine sounds closer to the real thing. They are almost like having a TV playing quietly at night.

I think my other senses are similar. I can abstractly remember or imagine touch, smell, taste, proprioception, and internal senses like arousal, hunger, pain, and nausea. But, these too are a bit abstracted and at arm's length.

I used to think of myself as highly visual, but my understanding of it becomes more nuanced with age, and with hearing how other people characterize themselves. I don't really think "in pictures" but I also certainly do not think "in words". I especially do not have an internal narrative nor monologue, and have to put effort into rendering my thoughts into words.

When planning or anticipating, I might imagine future scenarios including what I and others would say in conversation, and I imagine those almost the same as memories described above. I might conjur a person's mood, posture, tone of voice, and word choices. But I forecast non-verbal activities in much the same way, i.e. a hike along a windy ridge with a hawk circling above, or a dive into a swimming pool with bubbles streaming along my skin.

By wakeful, I was trying to distinguish the day dreaming mode from sleeping dreams, which are vivid and immersive (and periodically lucid). Those dreams are like being in a simulation or virtual reality. Day dreaming may be like running a simulation, but I am outside it, thinking about it more like a script or story board.

You've heard of daydreaming though, or the mind's eye. I assume they're cross-culturally universal concepts?

For my own part my teachers always told me off for daydreaming. When lying in bed as a child I would watch cartoons in my head (whilst awake, before falling asleep).

I can think of a table without picturing one, choose to picture an actual table (eg the one from my childhood home, perhaps on the day my dad revarnished it), or have a sort of meta-table before my mind's eye (cf Bertrand Russell!). The image of that table from my childhood isn't just a photo, it's like a cubist table, I can simultaneously 'see' different aspects of it despite them not being contiguous - like the top surface, the feet and the underside bolts; I can also feel it like a "mind's touch", and similarly with other senses. Scents tend only to appear fully in the context of memory though, or at least they're much stronger in that context (my mother cooking gingerbread, say; or the smell of my grandparents kitchen [poorly burnt gas!]).

It’s difficult to imagine that you don’t, I’m tempted to suggest that you think visual imagination must take over the eyes and appear as if in front of a person, and if it’s not that vivid it must not be visual. But that doesn’t appear to be what you’re saying.

How do you imagine the Nike swoosh or the McDonald’s Golden Arches or the Mona Lisa or the Eiffel Tower or the moon or anything which doesn’t have a nice spatial reference like forks in your kitchen or a clean fact-based shape like a square?

I can picture Tom and Jerry but not in any way where I could follow the lines and draw them or even answer questions like how big their eyes are compared to their noses, but it’s still visual and pictorial in some sense.

A square, I can “see” it as a white outline on a black background, or like a primary coloured filled blob like MS Paint style or Mondrian painting style, and not anything about it being a right angled parallelogram those are uncertain tenuous words that might change one day or be disconnected and reconnected to another shape.

For all the other things you mention I'd describe them as you might describe them in text. That's just how I think about them too. If I was trying to describe everything I noticed from a visit to McDonald's I might say something like "I noticed the golden arches, which seemed like an M with gentle curves at the top, perhaps twenty feet high" or something like that. Somewhat like recounting memories from a book you've read.

I mentioned in another comment, it seemed to me that books of fiction would be exceptionally boring if I couldn't visualize them. Really good books, I stop seeing words as I read.

I asked someone else this: what are your dreams like?

I'd actually assume that more visual thinkers would like fiction less as it would be a less compatible mode of thought. Another advantage, I'm never bothered by watching film adaptations and having not "pictured" scenes or characters "that way" - having never pictured them any way at all.

The ability to be visually immersed in a book does seem nice. It also strikes me as probably a bit of an exaggeration. I have a hard time believing people wouldn't be spending much more time reading than I observe them to if reading were really capable of such transport into fictional dimensions.

My dreams are as vivid as my waking life. Regarding describing letters, I can describe them as thoroughly as needed. If I couldn't recall a detail about a letter I could trace it in the air with my hand.

In reality, I think there's very little difference in the life of people with aphantasia, which is why most people don't realize it's even a thing until some circumstance in adulthood. The biggest problem it seems to cause me is with directions. People who know me well (girlfriend, brother, parents, etc) will habitually tell me every direction on the way somewhere if I'm driving. If I don't have someone in the car to direct me I always Google regardless of where I'm going. Without directions I get lost quite easily, perhaps attributable to not having a map in my head to look at. Or, perhaps an unrelated directional deficiency.

It’s a skill and takes effort. My wife visualizes what she reads seemingly without any trouble at all and can read more than one decent sized book per day.

Me it takes much longer. It’s about getting into a state of flow. Sometimes I just can’t get there and all I see are words and I struggle to keep straight what is going on in the book.

Sometimes I am kicked out of flow by the author dropping a descriptive visual detail late enough in the story that it conflicts with what I had imagined. As in, what do you mean so-and-so has blonde hair?

There have been times where this has happened and I just choose to ignore some of those details and carry on with the thing as I had imagined it.

I often like reading a book after having seen the movie or tv show if one exists because it makes the effort of visualization easier. I’m reading Leviathan Wakes, of which the first season of The Expanse is based. So I picture most of the characters the same. Except for Amos for some reason. He’s different in the book, and right now I couldn’t tell you what he looks like when I imagine him. I’ll have to try to make a point of remembering when I pick it up again.

I prefer books that only give hints of how things appear, to let my mind fill in the rest. It works better for me that way.

I get lost very easily, and have a terrible sense of direction. I particularly dislike directions that are landmark based as what people find memorable about a given scene varies quite a bit.

Plus after the first couple instructions I’m just not going to remember anyway, and prefer people just give me an address for mapping software.

Even people who have had the "split brain" surgery due to epilepsy are able to do complex visual tasks; they just cannot articulate what they are doing with words.

I can't find the video, but, they interviewed someone with this condition, and asked him to parse a visually ambiguous painting. He couldn't say how he interpreted it, but when given a pencil and paper, he could express it visually.

So that would explain when people say that they can only recall a verbal description of something, I think that their brain actually is creating an image of it, but it is just not appearing in their mind's eye. This could also explain why some studies have shown that people with aphantasia are just as competent, if not slightly better, at solving complex visual puzzles.

So, perhaps if you cannot imagine what something looks like, you might still be able to draw it.

In fact, I do have a quite concrete musical imagination, not very far from actually hearing the music I want (in fact, I have experienced episodes -especially when tired- of thinking I had actually heard it, when I was only hearing it in my mind) and I do spend considerable amounts of time playing music in my mind just for fun, both as background music for some other activity I'm doing or as a standalone activity.

On the other hand, this makes me thing they are on to something - if it's possible to play music in one's head, why not images? But I just can't with images.

As a kid I used to do exactly that. I can recall realizing one day that most people didn't use their imagination like a TV.

I used to have "serials" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_film ) I would watch/create as I went to sleep at night. Here's an odd detail: Every once in awhile my brain would notice that my head was sideways and get confused about how to orient the visual "presentation": vertically in line with gravity, or horizontally in line with my head and eyes, how it would be if I was sitting up or standing. When that happened it felt like trying to watch a TV turned sideways. The vast majority of nights this didn't happen.

If someone asked you what your favorite scene in a movie is, how would you respond?

It would seem to me that fiction books would be exceptionally boring if I was not able to visualize what I was reading.

If someone asked you to draw a sketch of your bedroom, could you? what would you be basing it on?

My favorite scene in a movie is a fact, as is what happened in it. I can remember what it was, even if I can't rewatch it in my head. Do you need to replay the whole thing to know what scene you liked the most?

Books are glorious fun. My experience of them is intensely verbal, though - my wife is intensely visual and often gets frustrated with books I loved because they don't use enough visual language for her to construct an internal movie from. So we get different things out of novels.

I would fail horribly if asked to sketch my bedroom. I can regurgitate the basic layout as a series of statements but can't begin to show you what it looks like (despite several years of doing okay in art lessons). If I'm not looking at it, I cannot draw it.

Have you ever watched any videos by 3blue1brown? I personally find I have difficulty understanding concepts until I find a way to visualize them. Which of course becomes very challenging for abstract mathematics. I wonder if you find things that are traditionally difficult to visualize easier to comprehend. Such as having greater intuition for higher dimensional math.

I think it may be easier for me to comprehend things that are hard to visualize. Higher math was a struggle for me at first, as I was not a natural reductionist, but once I had a really good calc prof, and after that it worked pretty well for me.

These days I can barely even do long division because I haven't had to use mathematical skills since I started working as a programmer, but when I was doing more advanced math, it seemed like it was less of a struggle for me than many of my classmates. That was especially true of formal proofs and linear algebra, I think.

I can enjoy good visuals in a movie, it's just that I can't "replay" them.

I think a good analogy may be food. I suppose most people don't have the ability to re-experience taste at will (I hope I'm not weird in that too)! If I ask you what is your favorite dish, you will perfectly know what it is, you will be able to describe the taste to me in a vague, conceptual way (using adjectives like "strong", "sweet", etc.) but you probably won't be able to just think about it and have its taste come to your mouth.

It's not even that the memory of the taste isn't detailed enough. It probably is, because if one day the dish is too cooked, too salty, etc. you can probably notice. So you do know how it tastes exactly, it's stored in your memory. It's just that you can't re-experience it in your mind. And of course, this doesn't mean that you can't enjoy food!

For me, the experience with movie scenes (or anything visual) is very similar to that. The Mona Lisa is stored in my memory, if you show me a copy of the real Mona Lisa and a copy with something changed (the hair, expression of her face, etc.) I can probably tell one from the other if it's not too subtle as well as anyone else, but there's just no explicit mind images involved in that, just like in the case with the food being too cooked.

As for books, I enjoy them a lot, I have always been a book lover. But I do notice that I enjoy more the story, facts, events going on, than the imagery. Those books that have more than 2-3 consecutive pages of descriptions tend to bore me, I long for more action, more events.

That's maybe the only consequence of aphantasia that I can think of in the "outer world", preference for one kinds of books over others. Because the funny thing is that, while it seems like a huge different internally, it really doesn't seem to affect skills or interactions with other people at all. In fact, the only tests of aphantasia I've seen are all subjective (they ask you about your mind images, or lack thereof). It's not like "try to solve this task, and if you can't, you have aphantasia". There don't seem to be real-world things that one can't do with aphantasia - in other conversations about this, people have mentioned the kind of puzzles with unfolded cubes where you have to know if they will be equal or not when you actually build the cube. But I can still solve them, I just don't have an image of the cubes rotating in my head with colors, drawings, etc. but I have the concept of "if I rotate the cube this way, this side will be rotated in such and such way" that allows me to solve the puzzle.

Part of me suspects this is perhaps just a minor variation in the brain’s handling/interpretation of information. There is tremendous variation in people’s ability to visualize and how concrete that visualization actually is.

Some artists can completely visualize the art they want to create before picking up a tool. I’m only like that in the vaguest sense. Most of the time my imagination imagery is fleeting and difficult to hold on to. Like seeing something out of the corner of your eye, but when you turn to look, it’s gone.

But my memory is either very visual or very sensory. I may not remember the details of some movie or other that I saw a year or two ago, but I will often still be able recall how it made me feel and whether I liked it or not.

As for food and tasting, I do recall flavors as if I am tasting them again, but to borrow a phrase... it is as though through a mirror, darkly. It’s an echo of the real thing. Less real. Not satisfying.

If I hadn't really noticed it before you asked, not remotely.

Police sketch artists seemed like demon summoners working black magic to me before I knew it was possible to visualize.

I won't be able to respond, because I have no idea.

If you show me, like, a catalogue with screenshots of 50 different movie scenes from the movies I watched, I could tell you which of these 50 scenes I like the most right now.

> It would seem to me that fiction books would be exceptionally boring if I was not able to visualize what I was reading.

Yes, they are. I've always tried to "read more", and after reading something, I was usually confused of how a book that everyone praises so highly is extremely dull to me.

But now, after I found out about the aphantasia staff, it's clear to me that maybe 80% of the books are written for people who can visualize, by authors whose intent was to express themselves in a way that promotes visual imagery.

If you take that away, most books are useless for me. They don't have a compelling story, and their purpose is to make the process of reading enjoyable. For me, on the other hand, the process of reading is irrelevant. When I read books, I'm looking for compelling stories and interesting concepts. For something to think about AFTER I've read the book.

My favorite book is 1984. The Lord of the Rings books are usually praised by people, but I'll spend a better time reading news than reading The Lord of the Rings.

"The protagonist tries to challenge an authoritarian government and ends up in prison, being lectured about the politics" is a far more meaningful and relatable story, than "The protagonist manages to destroy a certain ring, which somehow makes the evil god go away."

"So, I need to write about what happens to Sam and Frodo after they destroy the ring. Maybe they get stranded on the volcano and barely manage to survive, until a group of soldiers finds them and takes them to a safe place? Nah, it'll be too boring to imagine. Maybe the ancient aliens suddenly drop from the sky and rescue our heroes on their epic space ships made of dragons? Awesome, but it'll be too absurd. So, maybe the eagles appear, and Sam and Frodo fly on them? Perfect, it'll make this scene very enjoyable to imagine, while not being too farcical."

> If someone asked you to draw a sketch of your bedroom, could you? what would you be basing it on?

I could do it. I know my bedroom, and I'll start by drawing some basic lines and details, then I'll look at the drawing to compare it with my knowledge of the bedroom, maybe erase something, maybe add something, and repeat - until I know that I drew the best possible representation of what I know about my bedroom.

The thing with drawing is that I have to have the KNOWLEDGE about what I'm drawing in my conscious mind to be able to draw the thing.

For example, I'll recognize Obama if I look at a photo of him. But if you ask me to draw Obama, I won't be able to do it now, because I have no idea how specific features of him should look like. I can study Obama's portrait for some time, and then I'll be able to draw a better picture of him. But still, I won't be able to draw an accurate representation of him without a reference photo of him.

I'm guessing we're wired by evolution to put less value on the imaginary since those prone to it wouldn't have done as well. Some people, however, are prone to spending their time in imagination and there's some research on it as a mental disorder. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maladaptive_daydreaming.

Their analogy on how vivid the visualization is that it is similar to hearing your thoughts versus hearing yourself say something. Whether it is worth the time to go through the effort of visualizing something depends a lot on the task at hand, the cost of making mistakes working it out for real versus working it out mentally beforehand.

It's not like virtual reality but it does save me a lot of time in figuring out how to construct and put things together, or identify promising design paths.

Can you do all that without picturing any of it?

If you ask me to explain that, I do think in a kind of abstract first-person 3D map of the street and my home, which can be pretty accurate in terms of scale, angles, etc. and it is helpful enough to accurately perform the task at hand of describing how to find the fork. But I can't really say I picture it in any meaningful way. Things have no color, but I can't say that they are black and white either, they are just the concept of an object of a given shape occupying a given space. When I mentally go to my home's door, I can stop and think about what color the door is (only with one object at a time) but this feels more like assigning the concept of whiteness to the abstract idea of the door being there, than like evoking an image of the door.

To direct you to forks, I'd say "stand in the kitchen facing the bar, forks are in the right most drawer." I don't need to picture anything because I've committed directions like these to memory so that I can find forks and things myself. I don't mean that I've memorized phrases like that and I'm constantly chanting them to myself, but it's more like I have a memory of that fact and can serialize my memory into those words.

I couldn't tell you things that I didn't memorize - e.g. is the silverware drawer wider than other drawers? How many drawers are in my kitchen? Is there a handle on the drawer? What does it look like?