Aphantasia

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Aphantasia: A life without mental images - BBC News

I scored in the lowest 5% which probably explains my extreme difficulty forming mental images.
This https://www.braindecoder.com/aphantasia-newly-recognized-condition-of-a-blind-minds-eye-1236434508.html suggests it could be neurologically and/or psychologically based.

Interesting! The test wouldn't work for me on this computer so I might try again later...

The way it's described almost sounds like 'reverse' visual agnosia. I'd imagine it would have a neurological basis, but I'm keen to see more studies on this in the future.

I think my mental imagery is quite good when it comes to objects, but with certain people's faces I can't picture them at all.

I wonder what in the world was written about this such that the subjects with the congenital form of the condition were able to recognize it. It would be like people who'd been born completely deaf recognizing the experience of hearing by reading about it; actually, it would be even more difficult than that because visual imagery is a completely internal process, whereas deaf people can at least see how others behave when they are hearing/listening. How would congenital aphantasics grasp the concept of visual imagery, having never experienced it?

Perhaps it's simply the inability to grasp the concept of the mind's eye that indicates aphantasia. Of course, that's provided they had heard about the concept at some point or another, or had it explained to them. Like, I know I can conjure up images of objects in my head, so when the idea of the mind's eye is explained to me, I can grasp it. Someone with congenital aphantasia might have no clue what you're going on about if you try to explain it to them.

But I get what you mean; those people wouldn't know any different if they had never been exposed to the idea of mental imagery before.

I cannot, and never have been able to make any kind of mental image in my head.

Fascinating.

For me, i have never been able to create mental images. To me it is just normal to not be able to do it. I just never thought about it until about a year ago.

I don't think I've ever had problems with this, though I remember at age 8 forgetting what my parents looked like at summer camp. I tested in the average range.

I guess I can count myself lucky to be able to visualize as well as I can. My mental images are far from perfect but they still work well enough, I guess. Just kinda wish I had photographic memory....

18 out of 40. I find it hard to believe anybody could picture things more vividly than I can, it would be like having a photographic imagination. But as I've never been inside anybody's head, I would find it hard to believe.

But is there perhaps something wrong with the concept? I can recognise things I've seen before without much difficulty, and would usually know if something about the appearance of a thing had changed, so there must be a fairly good visual memory in my brain somewhere.

My visual memory is terrible... I forget what people look like all the time, I would be unable to draw them without seeing them if asked to do so, but if i encountered them and have seen them frequently enough I will know who they are.

I will often see something I have seen before and be unable to place where I know it from (even something that happened less than a year ago)...

This could even be a person, an actor or a specific place and upon further investigation there is always a reason they would be in my memory somewhere.

It can even be a tiny encounter for example seeing an extra on a TV show, then years later seeing them again in a different TV show and knowing I have seen them before and not knowing where from until I search IMDB, this also happens with voice actors, so it's not entirely visual.

If you asked me what I had for breakfast yesterday I would have to think about it for far to long, yet I know my credit card number off the top of my head, and my ICQ# I haven't used in at least 12 years.

It occurred to me that although I can't visualise "real" people or things very well, I can visualise fairly simple cartoon-style things much better. I could see a cartoon sunrise quite well for example, in vivid technicolour.

I guess this is the eggstreme end of lack of mental imagery, which is probably a spectrum from no mental imagery to super mental imagery. In one way, it seems nice to have blank field in one's mind, so images are not always flying around like transparencies like one on top of the other and you can see through them in layers or globs, but it seems also harder to do certain things if there is no mental imagery to visually manipulate things without words.

I'm similar, except it's mostly black and white cartoons. It takes effort to put colour on something.

17/40

31 - Typical
I do believe my score was elevated because of the sky questions an weather is a special interst

8/40 ( the lowest score), cannot see ant mental pictures, never have been able to.