I don’t know if I have it. And a bunch of quizzes and articles don’t seem to answer my questions. So here goes…
I can “picture” a lot of things. But more often than not, these depictions are not really “visual”.
I was intrigued when (about 10 years ago) my SO said that she could close her eyes and it was just like if someone turned on a projector behind her eyes. I’ve never experienced anything like that.
If I’m asked to picture a red apple, I will believe that I did just that. But I don’t “see” a color. You might say that I experience the feeling associated with “red”.
And some times it’s the opposite. I recall a feeling, but it turns to shapes and colors in my mind (though I still wouldn’t describe it nearly as “vivid” as actually seeing something colorful).
Even more, if someone describes a scene, I can “redraw” it in my mind, but it might resemble an impressionist painting. Or I “see” lines gradually sketching something on paper.
Remembering real experiences do “draw” something in my mind, first with muted colors, and then I superimpose the appropriate colors on top.
Somehow colors seem to be involved in some way or another (I’m terrible at picking colors that “look good”, even when I have them in front of me).
Maybe I do have aphantasia. Or maybe I’m looking too much into it. Any thoughts?
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Sounds like to me it is degrees, s you can’t completely picture it, and your SO can, then there are those like me, who see absolutely nothing.
My wife and I think she has that, not diagnosed though.
She cannot picture things in her mind. She can process things, naturally, and recognize things, and could describe a thing she has seen, but she gets no image whatsoever. When we were experimenting with this, I learned that whenever someone says something like “imagine an apple”, she just gets ready for the next statement.
To my knowledge, it’s normal for colors to fade in memories. Memories aren’t ever fully accurate representations, it’s your mind recreating the scene based on whatever in the scene your brain felt was important to it. A “memory” of a discussion in your bedroom might be more a recalled conversation, your brain remembering you were standing, and your general knowledge about your room that’s not specific to an individual memory.
So, I think you’re normal. I think some other people just describe the process you’re going through differently. You can believe you saw an image of an apple, and when your SO does that memory process of believing, she describes it as if it was right there.
I don’t know if it can have degrees. If it does, maybe you have it mildly, enough to explain the difference between you and your SO, but not enough to actually be diagnosable with it. For what it’s worth, though, I do the same, actually seeing a thing is far more vivid, but once I “build” the scene, it’s pretty much there, just not instant.
It’s a spectrum.
You know how in The Boy, Black Noir imagined cartoon characters?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Dxj60QZj5U
Some people can only picture base representations for a memory, some get cartoony versions, some get it on 4k 120fps, and some people get jack shit.
Almost nothing about human variation is regulated by just one set of genes to make something truly binary. And to look at it at the scale it could be considered binary, it’s just one tiny aspect of a much larger system that has redundancies.
Even literal blindness isn’t binary, some people legit have “daredevil sight” and can’t see consciousnessly but still has reaction because their subconscious is still wired up to the eyeballs.