by saltcured | 2025-06-06 19:45:50+00:00
Since you seem to want to appreciate the differences... I am also pretty far toward the aphantasia end of the spectrum.

Things like cars or airplanes, I could draw well enough to impress friends as a kid. That was partly partly due to constant classroom doodling. And, this was only for certain iconic types that I really studied. E.g. the round headlights of a classic Porsche 911 or the front view of an F4 Phantom II fighter yet from a Vietnam war movie. Even then, I couldn't really picture them directly, but I could _feel_ their 3D topography and use that almost like a surface model to feed into my hand acting as a 3D rendering pipeline. I don't see the image and reproduce it. I somehow feel the spatial model projecting onto the page and then try to pencil in that feeling before it dissipates. Yet, I can't do that for everyday items like my own car, laptop computer, or toothbrush. I can draw a generic representation, but can't remember and then reproduce any of the distinguishing characteristics that make my own possessions unique compared to the generic concept.

Similarly, I'm not face-blind, but I cannot remember and reconstruct any of the faces I know. I know them when I see them. I can also feel a lot of "this person looks a lot like that person", which sometimes helps me realize the specific expression features, angles, proportions, or even dynamics that are triggering my recognition. But I can't really recite any of that to tell you what I recognize.

I'm a bit like someone else said earlier in the thread. Imagining a bouncing ball, it's a feeling of the diminishing parabolas in 3D. You might sketch it the way a cartoonist shows a trace in the air behind something to indicate movement. But that's already more visual than my own imagining of it, which is more like a faint echo of that cartoon trace. And, it is somehow both dynamic and static. I feel the linked chain of parabolas all at once, but also somehow feel the movement vectors.

If you told me to imagine a particular type of ball, I could even imagine different trajectories and deformations, e.g. a hard rubber "superball" vs an old tired tennis ball vs a big squishy dodgeball from elementary school. But just asked to imagine a ball, I wouldn't select such details. It would just be the abstract path. And even when specialized, I still don't really see the ball or any color, just a feeling of the spatial scene that it traverses.

For me, this aphantasia is all about my waking/voluntary mental mode. I can have completely vivid lucid dreams which can sometimes be mundanely realistic and sometimes surreal. If I'm very tired, I might also get some imagery right as I near the hynogogic threshold. This is true for imagined vision, hearing, proprioception, and touch senses. They are all very "abstract" when awake and take form as the waking world slips away.

Not sure it is relevant, but I also have no internal monologue whether awake or in dreams. I can think about words or speech, but it is abstract and a bit like composing them in an editing buffer (which, due to aphantasia I can't really see!). Thinking is not at all like talking nor like listening.