Comic Strips

I don't think I have an inner monologue. Also I have full Aphantasia. I can't visually imagine an apple let alone rotate it in my mind.

Yes, it's quite wild but I guess I can't really say that as someone without the ability to imagine things.

Yeah! I don't think I do in the sense some people do, in the sense that some people describe having a narrator or something like that. If I am to think in words or sentences it takes a little more effort and happens when I'm thinking about talking to someone or putting things into words, whereas my passive thinking is generally wordless, and more conceptual/spacial/tactile.

I have something similar. I have to push, extremely hard, mentally. Even then the resultant visualization is weak and fuzzy.

In my mind, the concept and the image are decoupled. I have the concept of an apple. A viewed apple can be matched to it for comparisons. That concept includes all variants. Red, green, yellow, small, large, bpy or smooth. It also doesn't have a view direction built in.

It's a bit like how you can still recognise a cat, when seen from below. You might never have seen it like that, but your model of "catness" includes it. You can mentally render it and compare. My brain just drops the rendering stage as useless fluff.

This might be it.

I gave up watching the news daily back after the November election. Since then, my creativity has returned.

The only logical thing to do is quit my job so the hallucinations will return.

It's not as clear as real vision, but if I close my eyes I can really "see" a visual image of the thing I'm thinking of.
Really like a "visual hallucination" as you said, but it clearly exists in, how can I say? "Another space"?

It doesn't automatically translate to the muscle movements required to draw it.

If people actually saw complete images in their minds, they'd be far easier to recreate and I think everyone would be more artistically inclined.

People can't even draw stuff that is sitting in front of them, in real life, unless they've practiced. There's a lot more involved in drawing than just knowing what something looks like.

Sounds like somoene with aphantasia would say.

But jokes aside, it's most likely a significan difference since people with aphantasia would lack the physical reaction to inner images.

For example, when a normal person is asked to imagine a bright light source, a slight dilation of pupil can be noticed. Kinda shocking to find out that tbh.

Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9018072/

I have aphantasia. I definitely cannot rotate a cube in my mind. I can with great effort and concentration kind of do what you describe, follow where individual edges and vertices would be in space relative to each other, but normally it would just be the idea in my head "there's a cube and it's rotating".

My go to test for aphantasia goes like this:

• "Imagine a circle"
• "OK"
• "What color is it?"

People always answer with color and many times with a more detailed visual description, like texture, material, the surrounding scene, etc. I personally would very stumped by that question because when asked to imagine a circle, I just imagine the concept of a circle. It has no color, no texture, no substance.

Ok, I'll add my personal experience here. When I imagine something, like an apple, my perception of the imagined object ranges from a rather blurry apple to a very detailed apple, but anyway I do peceive it very visually. It's definitely not just understanding in my case. I perceive the color, the shape, movements if need be, everything. When I do this, the normal perception coming from my eyes kind of shuts down and I only concentrate on "seeing" the thing I imagine, but if I focus I can also imagine something being somewhere in a real lication I see with my eyes, so then it feels a bit like AR. I've read somewhere that the same centers in the brain are active when you imagine something and when you see it, so you could say it's a kind of deliberate visual hallucination. I can also do this with music - I can play it in my head and enjoy hearing it.