A similar subjective experience just came up recently[1] on HN as an aside in an article posted about Derek Parfitt:
> He attributes [his severely deficient autobiographical memory] to his inability to form mental images. Although he recognizes familiar things when he sees them, he cannot call up images of them afterward in his head: he cannot visualize even so simple an image as a flag; he cannot, when he is away, recall his wife’s face. (This condition is rare but not unheard of; it has been proposed that it is more common in people who think in abstractions.)
That article was from 2011, before the term aphantasia was coined in 2015[2] and (arguably) popularized in 2016[3]. Most folks also assume that everyone uses their visual cortex to process memories while that idea sounds absolutely implausible to some relatively small percentage of the population.
I had a surprising conversation with a talented artist a while back and while we were discussing methods it came up that they always had to work from a model or photograph because they could not recall images, at all, from memory.
I think it's more common for people with this to cope by thinking in terms of abstractions, rather than the other way around.
The flag's a great example. Can't call up an image of a flag, but I can hold a kind of inferred 'essense' of a flag based on the abstract idea. Rectangle, some dividing lines depending on the country, kinda a wavy shader effect on the edges, probably a pole off to one side holding it up. But that's as rich as the image gets.
If internal monologue is supposed to be an actual voice that you perceive vividly then yeah, that's not present either.
I don't know enough about SDAM to know if it's the same thing as visual aphantasia, but they are presumably related. I am unable to visualize anyone's face (or, really, anything at all that isn't a black void), yet I can easily recognize the person (especially if I know them well) and I can describe them. What I can describe about them are whatever notes I've made about them to myself along the way (round face, black hair, mustache, broad chin, etc).
> He attributes [his severely deficient autobiographical memory] to his inability to form mental images. Although he recognizes familiar things when he sees them, he cannot call up images of them afterward in his head: he cannot visualize even so simple an image as a flag; he cannot, when he is away, recall his wife’s face. (This condition is rare but not unheard of; it has been proposed that it is more common in people who think in abstractions.)
That article was from 2011, before the term aphantasia was coined in 2015[2] and (arguably) popularized in 2016[3]. Most folks also assume that everyone uses their visual cortex to process memories while that idea sounds absolutely implausible to some relatively small percentage of the population.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22037240
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001094521...
[3] https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-...