interesting. does it make your life difficult in any way? have you ever been forced to play pictionary or any online version of it? i don't have aphantasia and can draw well with a reference but my mind goes blank when asked to draw things without a reference so i might as well have it in those moments
Date: October 21st, 2026 12:38 AM Author: checked out chud
it's hard for me to answer. i have no idea how my subjective experience compares to others'. like, can other people *actually* "see" an apple in their mind's eye, with every detail, like a photograph? i don't know
i can play pictionary just fine. i'm not great at drawing but i've never tried to learn how to be better at it either. i'm very good at visuospatial reasoning. apparently aphantasia doesn't affect that. although it seems like it would just be a total cheat code to be able to literally see whatever i wanted in my mind's eye. the way i visuospatially reason is by abstract association, i guess. i just "know" where things are in space and how they relate to each other
it's very odd. it has never held me back at all; i've always tested super high on everything and am good at pretty much everything i do. but it seems like it must be a way better subjective experience to live with the ability to literally visualize whatever you want in your head, if other people can really do that
yeah i figured it wouldn't have had any negative effect on your life to not be able to visualize things bc how do we even use that? interesting that you're fine at pictionary, it must not be super severe then.
Date: October 21st, 2026 12:45 AM Author: checked out chud
navigation and facial recognition are easy because they can be easily abstractly represented as patterns, i think. i'm good at both, especially navigation
i think the biggest difference is anything visually unique that's fully visual and can't be abstractly represented, like art. which might be why i've never been very into art
interesting. just went thru some aphantasia test prompts. personally i can't vividly bring an image to mind either (and when i'm reading fiction it's rare that i imagine the scenes; usually i'm just processing the narrative as Things Happening) but if i imagine my FOV as a blank canvas i can fill in the page on demand with some effort. there's some level of detail but it's also not super clear.
Date: October 21st, 2026 1:30 PM Author: checked out chud
Yeah what I suspect is that other people are rating their own subjective experiences as much more visually full and accurate and precise than they actually are
It's a purely self reported thing so I'm super skeptical about it. Like I really just don't think that other people can literally "see" images in their mind's eye, at will. The world would work much differently if this was true. Humans in general would be far more capable and imaginative
i mean i believe that some people really do see things very vividly but yeah the self-assessment makes no sense to me, like in the one i looked at you're supposed to try to imagine something and rate it from 1 to 5 for "no image" to "as clearly and vividly as actual vision"... how would anyone 2-4 know whether we're 2, 3, or 4???