I’m don’t have aphantasia, but I’m pretty sure I’m worse than average at mental imagery (and far worse with faces).
Either way, seems easier to imagine not having a minds eye than to have photorealistic mental imagery. My inner-world isn’t visualization-focused.
Trying to visualize something with detail generally requires trying to back-solve for an image from what I know about it. Like, if I want to imagine a gamecube, I have a very vague cube-like structure image to start with, but I have to think about the ports and the side wings and handle and the expansion for GBA games individually and add them to that vague purple and white cube. While I know there are dot indicators for play 1-4, I can’t tell you if they’re above or below the ports since I never really physically interact with them, but I know where the eject button is and how its sorta dimpled since I directly interacted with that many of times. There’s no point to going through that effort of trying to make a mental image.
I’m don’t have aphantasia, but I’m pretty sure I’m worse than average at mental imagery (and far worse with faces).
Either way, seems easier to imagine not having a minds eye than to have photorealistic mental imagery. My inner-world isn’t visualization-focused.
Trying to visualize something with detail generally requires trying to back-solve for an image from what I know about it. Like, if I want to imagine a gamecube, I have a very vague cube-like structure image to start with, but I have to think about the ports and the side wings and handle and the expansion for GBA games individually and add them to that vague purple and white cube. While I know there are dot indicators for play 1-4, I can’t tell you if they’re above or below the ports since I never really physically interact with them, but I know where the eject button is and how its sorta dimpled since I directly interacted with that many of times. There’s no point to going through that effort of trying to make a mental image.