I appreciate that outlook on life!

I have heard of the concept as a “mind palace”, but I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I just assumed it was a meme. I’ll try to practice it a bit to remember something. My mind sort of works like this with word or concept associations already, but it’s much less organized than this concept. As I can visualize blurry images, it might work to some degree.

My career is in various areas of software development, and learning to make diagrams with tools like Mermaid really helped me because I can struggle to visualize the diagrams I want to create. Since you just type out the connections you want to make programmatically, it allows me to make diagrams more easily than with any kind of visual tools. Hopefully that clarifies what I mean by thinking in concept associations already rather than visualizations.

If you’re familiar with the podcast No Such Thing As A Fish, one of the hosts (James Harkin) has aphantasia and discussed it in an episode within the last few months that quite a few animators at Pixar experience the condition as well. I also assumed when I learned about it that it was why I’m terrible with visual arts. It would seem that’s not a good excuse.

That’s really interesting. That’s more or less how it is for me. I know to draw two overlapping-but-offset squares and to connect the corresponding corners with a line, but I can sort of visualize the concept of a cube more than the cube itself. I also can generally instantly recognize a cube on paper if I see one.

When you think about a memory, do you see anything at all visually? I can imagine a very blurry image, but the actions feel like it’s stop motion and very out of focus. I just have to sort of know or have an intuition for what the objects may be. As an example, I know the first vehicle I drove and the physical details, but visualizing it only shows a sort of rough, dark outline that I can’t place any of those details on or even really describe them in enough detail that someone else could draw it.

You’re welcome! It’s not something I really think about often as it really doesn’t affect my day to day life in a meaningful way, but I’m happy to help clarify it a bit for others! I was extremely confused when I found out people can just fully imagine an apple or something with loads of detail. Haha.

If it’s a completely grey cube, I can sort of imagine it, but it’s like I can’t smoothly rotate it or visualize things like lighting or shades of grey. It’s sort of like just seeing it jump from one angle to the next with a lot of the angles just not “showing up” in my mind, and they aren’t really connected images. I couldn’t visualize movements on a Rubik’s cube, but that’s not the same as not being able to run the algorithm and solve it with my hands. For clarity, I don’t know the algorithm to solve one, but I mean the colors aren’t something I can really imagine on the cube. Like I said, I don’t have complete aphantasia, so this is solely my experience. I don’t know if that’s just me or purely the aphantasia.

Since aphantasia is a bit of a spectrum, I have it to a decent degree as I can only imagine blurry images in my head. I only learned about it doing some psychological testing when it was a test my psychologist wanted me to take. I can only speak for myself as I don’t know anyone else with the same kind of condition IRL, but in general I just sort of memorize task order for repetitive things. I imagine you do the same, but you have visual cues memorized in the same way I just know the steps to do something. It’s not like I don’t recognize what I’m looking at when it’s in front of me. I tend to think of it as having to be very analytical when doing one of those “spot the difference” image puzzles. I know both images have a potted plant, but it’s easier if I have them side by side to know that one was a succulent and the other was a fern. I don’t know if that analogy helps you. I don’t know what it’s like to have a vivid visual imagination, so it’s the best metaphor I can think of at the moment.

I have done remote tech support for software that I wrote which was pretty difficult if I couldn’t look at it myself locally. At least for me, I can know the properties of something such as a friend having long, red hair, but I couldn’t just visualize their face. I would still recognize them immediately when I see them. If it’s something like a tripped breaker, I just know to tell the person which room to go into and what a tripped breaker will look like so they can identify it themselves. It’s not like you don’t have a memory, but for me the visual parts of those memories are just too blurry to describe that way.

I can read fiction just fine, but it helps if the characters are illustrated in some kind of way so I know what I’m supposed to imagine while the action is happening. That could even just be a single picture of cover art. At least for me, I can still picture a cobblestone street, but I sort of just see a lot of beige or gray things in my mind with almost no definition. From reading online of the 1-5 scale of aphantasia and comparing it to the test results I got back in percentages, I think I’m somewhere between a 3 and a 4 for levels of intensity if that helps to clarify my perspective at all.

Apologies for the essay response, but I hope it helps to understand! If it’s any consolation, I find it kind of ironically hilarious that I can’t imagine having a vivid imagination.

ETA: It looks like the original test used 1 as completely unable to imagine things and 5 to a vivid imagination. That scale was flipped for the second version of the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire. My scale of 1-5 is based on the second edition, I am on the lower end of the spectrum of vividness, but I can still sort of imagine things to a certain degree.