Think about your breakfast this morning. Can you imagine the pattern on your coffee mug? The sheen of the jam on your half-eaten toast?

Most of us can call up such pictures in our minds. We can visualize the past and summon images of the future. But for an estimated 4% of people, this mental imagery is weak or absent. When researchers ask them to imagine something familiar, they might have a concept of what it is, and words and associations might come to mind, but they describe their mind’s eye as dark or even blank.

… the topic received a surge of attention when, a decade ago, an influential paper coined the term aphantasia to describe the experience of people with no mental imagery.

Much of the early work sought to describe the trait and assess how it affected behaviour. But over the past five years, studies have begun to explore what’s different about the brains of people with this form of inner life. The findings have led to a flurry of discussions about how mental imagery forms, what it is good for and what it might reveal about the puzzle of consciousness: researchers tend to define mental imagery as a conscious experience, and some are now excited to study aphantasia as a way to probe imagery’s potentially unconscious forms.

The article itself went into a lot of past and current research into aphantasia and is quite detailed, worth a read if you are interested (especially if you are also quite high on the aphantasia scale like OP)

Try this archive.org link if it is paywalled

Edit: some of you all should take the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVID). The article only gave an excerpt, there seem to be a few free ones floating on the internet

  • devfuuu@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    9 hours ago

    I may have this thing and never realized. Wtf. People vividly see colors and images in their minds? 😱. One more to add to the list, oh well.

    • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.netEnglish
      2·
      5 hours ago

      Yeah, it blew my mind.

      The thing that did it for me is that I realised that if I tried to imagine an apple, then it wouldn’t have a colour before someone asked me what colour it was. Like, I was simultaneously imagining an apple that was deep red, like what the witch gave to Snow White. But I’m also imagining a green apple, like a granny smith. Or a pink and green one, like a Pink Lady.

      Except that doesn’t make sense, because one apple can’t be three different colours simultaneously. I realised that I wasn’t so much visualising an apple, but more like accessing a database entry for apples. e.g.

      Apples:

      • Can be deep red
      • Can be green
      • can be pink and green
      • can be other colours
      • apples are on the first aisle in the big grocery store

      Stuff like that.

      • devfuuu@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        5 hours ago

        I can process the concept and imagine it, but I didn’t know people are supposed to have true color real life rendering inside their heads while imagining things. It’s more like a description or a sequence of facts that create an ilusion of the thing. It’s not even in wireframe format. I should dig deeper into this. It’s more like thinking about thinking with a 2 level indirection.